As far as can be ascertained from what is available, this thesis did not recieve any EU/government funding and is just a "normal" thesis one does if they're doing a masters degree in philosophy or whatever subject it is in. Many of the papers and research in this rough area usually are funded by governments but this does not appear to be the case here.
PDF as image can be found on this post: https://kiwifarms.st/threads/trans-...e-economies-aint-i-trans.236156/post-23343596
Entire PDF text contents:
Trans Bovine Politics:
Furry Tranimacies in Cringe
Economies (Ain’t I Trans?)
Lara van der Bent
Student number: s1108917
Supervisor: dr. K.B. Smiet (Katrine)
Word count: 19,972 words
Date: 01-10-2025
Thesis to obtain the degree of "Master of Arts" in Philosophy at Radboud University
Nijmegen
Abstract:
A trans bovine politics is a politics of engaging and becoming with real-life
transspecies actors in the ongoing project of constructing and discovering figures
whose speech and behavior contest reified queer/feminist discourses. Primarily
focusing on the interaction between historical and contemporary narratives of
transgender and transspecies actors, this thesis explores and problematizes
anxieties of conflation between the historically vulnerable and politically contested
category of transgender with seemingly frivolous transspecies identities; especially
for the latter's position within public visibility as cringeworthy. Applying the
methodology of feminist figuration, I bind together several trans and transspecies
accounts under the name trans bovine; and explore the possibilities the inhabitation
of this intersectional figure affords in the expansion of queer knowledges and
affective political strategies.
2
Hereby I, Lara van der Bent, declare and assure that I have composed the present
thesis with the title Trans Bovine Politics: Furry Tranimacies in Cringe Economies
(Ain’t I Trans?), independently, that I did not use any other sources or tools other
than indicated and that I marked those parts of the text derived from the literal
content or meaning of other works – digital media included – by making them known
as such by indicating their source(s).
Rotterdam, 23-06-2025
COW-WOMAN
1 Juliana Huxtable, untitled Instagram
publicity post, November 18, 2020.
LOLCOW
2 Christine Weston Chandler, “2018 05
10 I Am Sick of the HATE! I could use a
break,” YouTube video, May 11, 2018,
transcript by Will Banks.
4
CONTENTS
Introduction ................................................................................................................ 6
Why a trans bovine politics ................................................................................. 6
Research question and sub-questions ................................................................ 7
Methodology: feminist figuration.......................................................................... 8
Relevance to and engagement with ongoing queer/feminist discourse............... 9
Thesis overview .................................................................................................. 9
1. The cow-woman ................................................................................................... 12
The cow-woman: introduction ............................................................................... 12
Juliana Huxtable’s cow-woman ......................................................................... 12
Donna Haraway’s cyborg .................................................................................. 13
Transnormativity ................................................................................................... 14
From transnormativity to transspecies necropolitics ............................................. 16
Terrible grounds: the zoo and the farm.............................................................. 16
Tranimacies: animacy hierarchy and the nonhuman turn .................................. 17
Necropolitical reproduction ................................................................................... 19
Cattle and chattel .............................................................................................. 19
The cow-woman as a satire of visibility politics ..................................................... 21
The cow-woman as a human/nonhuman cyborg: dancing on terrible grounds . 22
Facetious furries: from the litter box hoax to anti-furry legislation ......................... 23
The cow-woman: conclusion ................................................................................ 24
2. The lolcow ............................................................................................................ 26
The lolcow: introduction ........................................................................................ 26
Christine Chandler: the lolcow of lolcows .......................................................... 27
The farm cringe complex ...................................................................................... 28
The limits of figuration ....................................................................................... 28
Furries and therians: giving “real” trans people a bad name? ........................... 29
Methodologies of cringe and harassment ............................................................. 31
The affect of cringe: compassion and contempt ................................................ 31
Moral rationalizations for visceral disgust and normative harassment .............. 32
Escalation of harassment: in-group and out-group cringe ................................. 34
The lolcow: conclusion.......................................................................................... 35
5
3. The trans bovine................................................................................................... 36
The Trans Bovine: introduction ............................................................................. 36
Ecce bovo ............................................................................................................. 37
Ain’t I a woman? ................................................................................................... 39
Ain’t I a fluctuating identity? The politics of instability, irony and contradiction .. 40
Ain’t I (this) animal? .............................................................................................. 42
Facetious furries: cute, cuddly, corporate and carnal ........................................ 42
Dehumanization: queerness, Blackness and animality ..................................... 43
Corporeal affirmation ......................................................................................... 45
Extra-corporeal affirmation ................................................................................ 46
Ain’t I trans? .......................................................................................................... 47
Species dysphoria ............................................................................................. 47
On becoming with: kinship vs. identity .............................................................. 49
Open-bodied-ness: phantom and mental shifts ................................................. 50
Furries and therians as physical/virtual cyborgs ............................................... 51
The trans bovine: conclusion ................................................................................ 53
Conclusion: trans bovine politics .............................................................................. 54
Sub-question #3: Trans bovines, trans figures? ................................................ 54
Sub-question #1: Trans(species) subjugation? ................................................. 55
Sub-question #2: Lolcows, unfairly maligned? .................................................. 57
Furry tranimacies in cringe economies.............................................................. 58
Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 59
6
INTRODUCTION
Why a trans bovine politics
I have prefaced this thesis by capturing two social media moments by Juliana
Huxtable and Christine Chandler, two public figures from seemingly very different
backgrounds, but who share a number of characteristics that have seen them
struggling against systemic and perpetual devaluation of their desires as frivolous –
grappling with common sense, normalcy, taboo, and their own hypervisibility. And
here, in this encounter between me and their art, they do so as bovines, as cows.
I have titled this thesis a specifically trans bovine politics because it is impossible for
me to think transgender without thinking transspecies – the transing of both having
been demanded by my own body.3 This trans politics is specifically bovine because
transness has proven to be one of the main identifiers which can mark a person for
milking as a possible lolcow – a term I will explore in detail in chapter 2, but which,
for now, can briefly be described as a marker used to violently brand some of the
most intensively documented, harassed, and othered people in the history of internet
communities. Yet, while the trans bovine is expected to always stand at the ready to
passively perform its duties to the industrial milk machine, it has also shown that it is
perfectly capable of actively operating the milking equipment itself. In its moment of
(hyper)visibility, it has been given the opportunity to ally itself with normative
mainstream forces in an attempt to elevate itself above this vulnerability – to take up
the role of the farmer so that it may escape the fate of the farmed. Specifically,
transgender may attempt to distance itself from transspecies, as a strategy of
survival in a hostile environment.
The last few sentences may well read as a cartoon-villain reduction of the complex
production and maintenance of normativities in trans spaces. Yet, my thesis is
inspired by this moment of visibility – this simultaneous existence of
trans/transgender/transspecies actors both as real individuals, and as rhetorical
devices wielded in a complex web of agendas – and precisely this has been what
has spurred me on to draw the lolcow into trans politics. Throughout this thesis, I will
3 A note on terminology. Though the term trans (as both a noun and a verb) originated in transgender
discourse and theory, the word has gradually become a broader umbrella term, not only for a variety
of gender-nonconforming identities, but also encompassing any “movement across a socially imposed
boundary away from an unchosen starting place – rather than any particular destination or mode of
transition” (Susan Stryker, Transgender History, Seal Press, 2008, p.1). Several of the authors cited
later in this text (Steinbock, Szczygielska, and Wagner; Weil; Kelley; Proctor; Hayward and Gossett;
Wolf) have opted here for the arguably more precise term trans* (with asterisk). Except when citing
these authors verbatim, I myself have opted for the more straightforward term trans (without asterisk).
The two should be considered synonymous for the purposes of this thesis. Both terms also grapple
with the possible inclusion of transspecies, which can mean either (1) a turn away from human-centric
perspectives through inclusion of nonhuman ontologies, (2) a breaching of strict biological boundaries
between species, or (3) the self-identification of individuals or communities, in any manner and to any
degree, as part of a nonhuman animal species; this includes therians and arguably also furries, both
of which I will be discussing more in detail later. Finally, since this thesis largely builds upon my own
perspective, I will often be using the term transgender as shorthand for transgender woman.
7
develop the figures of the cow-woman (as envisioned by Huxtable) and the lolcow
(as exemplified by Chandler) as two modes of existence which will allow me to
isolate and make apparent certain qualities of bovine living and (re)production, as
situated in the context of a humanist, human-centered history. Of special interest to
my thesis are those expressions of transspecies embodiment whose affects and
behaviors are widely seen as frivolous, as unworthy of visibility, as an
embarrassment – in other words, as cringe. My aim is to sit uncomfortably with
precisely these figures, and to ask what they may have to offer to trans thinking.
Research question and sub-questions
As such, I have formulated the following research question:
What is the current position and possible contribution of cringe
transspecies/transgender actors within broader trans discourse and theory,
considering their frictions with transnormativity4 and their status as targets of ridicule
and harassment?
Which can be broken down into three sub-questions:
In chapter 1, “The cow-woman”, I will mainly be exploring sub-question #1:
What are the normative forces at play which co-produce the shared sites of
subjugation between transgender and transspecies actors? And how may
explorations of trans bovine figures work to bring these sites and forces of
subjugation into sharper focus?
In chapter 2, “The lolcow”, I will mainly be exploring sub-question #2:
To what extent does the weaponization of cringe and/or transspecies actors against
transgender rights rely on the uncritical adoption of a notion that transspecies actors
should be considered unworthy of having a stake in visual politics of embodiment?
And to what degree is this perceived unworthiness derived from a politics which is
genuinely wary of possible frictions between transgender and transspecies visibility,
4 I will elaborate on the term later, but for now, transnormativity indicates ways of being transgender
that are deemed normatively acceptable and presentable to the world at large. Conversely, any trans
person whose behavior and/or presentation are not perceived as transnormative will be considered an
embarrassment to – even a possible threat to the safety of – the transgender community, because
this person “makes us look bad” to the point of invalidating our vulnerable identity in the eyes of
broader society. The origin of the term is hard to pinpoint; the earliest source I could find is Fred
Joseph LeBlanc, who does not explicitly claim to have coined the term, but almost: “The discussion of
essentialist identity, physical bodies, and conservativism in the transgender online community does
suggest a privileging of certain articulations and practices, a normativity within the transgender
identities: a transnormativity.” (Fred Joseph LeBlanc, “Unqueering Transgender? A Queer Geography
of Transnormativity in Two Online Communities,” Master’s thesis, Victoria University of Wellington,
2010, p.90).
Later writers use the term without citing a source, for example C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn
(cited later in this text) or Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco (cited later in this text).
Austin Johnson calls transnormativity a “new concept” but also provides no sources (Austin Johnson,
“Transnormativity: A New Concept and Its Validation through Documentary Film About Transgender
Men,” in: Sociological Inquiry, Vol. 86, Issue 4, November 2016, pp.465-491).
8
rather than from a visceral disgust with actual transspecies affects, behaviors, and
desires?
In chapter 3, “The trans bovine”, I will mainly be exploring sub-question #3:
What kinds of new languages and behaviors may specifically cringe transspecies
expressions offer to especially trans discourse and theory? And to what extent is the
capacity of transspecies actors to contribute to trans discourse and theory reliant on
their access to a highly informed understanding of said literature? In other words, is
the sheer act of existing, creating and otherwise marking the world as a transspecies
actor, sufficient to further confuse the boundaries and subjugations which trans
literature seeks to disrupt?
Methodology: feminist figuration
The main methodology through which I will be approaching these transspecies
actors – cringe and otherwise – will be that of feminist figuration, as I have learned
from Donna Haraway5 and Rosi Braidotti.6 Feminist figuration can be understood as
“a style of thought that evokes or expresses ways out of the phallocentric vision of
the subject […] a politically informed account of an alternative subjectivity,” 7 by
means of “performative images that can be inhabited,” 8 which thus allow us “to
elaborate alternative accounts, to learn to think differently about the subject, to invent
new frameworks, new images, new modes of thought.” 9 For feminist figuration, the
aim is to destabilize those processes which enable the forming and maintenance of a
generic (by default white, male, industrialized, moneyed) kind of humanity, by
presenting non-generic feminist figures of humanity as counterproposals. Typically
these figurations are based on / inspired by / called into life by inspiring actors –
“ecstatic speakers” 10 – who approach being human in a manner which, indeed, looks
quite different from the more generic shape(s) of humanity. Furthermore, these
figurations urge for the adoption of new perspectives within feminist thought, as a
way of addressing a perceived crisis within feminism’s own discourses, insofar as
these have proven unable to lift us out of – or have even been complicit in – “our
entrapment in the stories of the established disorders.” 11
5 (a) Donna Haraway, Modest−Witness@Second−Millennium.FemaleMan−Meets−OncoMouse:
Feminism and Technoscience, Routledge, 1997. (b) Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs:
Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in: Socialist Review, Vol. 80, 1985,
pp.65-107. Later republished as a chapter of Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature, Routledge, 1991, pp.149-181.
6 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, Columbia University Press, 1994.
7 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p.1.
8 Haraway, Modest−Witness, p.11.
9 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p.1.
10 Donna Haraway, “Ecce Homo, Ain’t (Ar’n’t) I a Woman and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a
Post-Humanist Landscape,” in: Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan Scott,
Routledge, 1992.
11 Ibid., p.86.
9
Relevance to and engagement with ongoing queer/feminist discourse
Considering that feminist figuration is to be my main methodology, the philosophical
relevance of this thesis lies in an assessment of the value of my proposed trans
bovine figure to ongoing queer/feminist academic theories and discourses. I ask how
this trans bovine figure, as a transspecies/transgender figuration which allows us to
inhabit this uneasy relationship between trans and animal, might destabilize present
discourses around the academic and real-life expansion of the category of trans to
include transspecies. As a side note, and at the risk of seeming frivolous, or being
quoted out of context in a way that might cast doubt on the sincerity of my project: I
hope to sell you these trans bovines above the present market price, as rich,
pregnant, fat sites of a very transgender/transspecies production and reproduction. I
hope for these heifer-women12 to fight for me – as idols which may take on and
convey my frustration and broad dysphoria with the trans state of things, as digital
bodily maps which may chart where the multifaceted trans desires I experience and
encounter have been channeled into a singular, almost pre-identified, process of
becoming.
Thesis overview
The cow-woman and the lolcow are thus the transspecies figures through which I will
be seeking out answers to my research sub-questions. In the first chapter, I will
deploy the figure of the cow-woman, as brought into the world by artist Juliana
Huxtable13 and subsequently researched by scholar Lillian Wolf,14 in order to
address my first sub-question and to provide the reader with a blueprint of how
transspecies figurations might be used to open up trans thought. Among the key
works and concepts I will be exploring and applying here are Donna Haraway’s own
feminist figure of the cyborg,15 as well as various writings on the nonhuman turn by
authors such as Lindsay Kelley16 and Mel Chen,17 who emphasize and corroborate a
need to animate nonhuman actors in thinking across gendered spaces. I will also be
applying Wolf’s analysis of the cow-woman as a figure capable of revealing to us
how our own affects as trans people may open up new modes of living, but also how
these modes of living risk placing us in league with regressive transnormative forces,
as described by C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn in an essay titled “Trans
12 A heifer is a young cow, usually (but not exclusively) one who has not yet given birth to a calf.
13 Juliana Huxtable and Reena Spauldings Fine Art, Juliana Huxtable: Interfertility Industrial Complex:
Snatch the Calf Back, 2019. https://www.reenaspaulings.com/images3/JHfile2.pdf
14 Lillian Wolf, “Juliana Huxtable’s Cow-Woman; or, A Black Trans Femme Route Toward Pleasure,”
in: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Vol. 10, Nrs. 3-4, 2023, pp. 247-264.
15 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.”
16 Lindsay Kelley, “Tranimals,” in: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Vol. 1, Nrs. 1-2
(“Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies”), eds. Paisley
Currah and Susan Stryker, May 2014, pp.226-228.
17 Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Duke University Press,
2012, p.13.
10
Necropolitics.” 18 Finally, I will explore how Huxtable’s own comments on her artwork,
for example in a conversation with Bella Spratley,19 may propose a somewhat
diverging, but nonetheless additive read of the cow-woman as a satirical
commentary on trans representational politics.
In the second chapter I will focus particularly on the phenomenon of the lolcow,
mainly as encountered on specialized online forums dedicated to the harassment
and obsessive documentation of individuals branded as such. The real-life people,
the ecstatic speakers embodying the lolcow figuration are (individually) Christine
Chandler, and (collectively) furry/therian communities.20 Beyond their status as
lolcows, furries/therians and Chandler have in common that their transness is both
unclear and a matter of contention for transnormative politics. Not only has their
speech, art, and otherwise strikingly non-normative behavior been weaponized to
destabilize trans rights, it is also unclear whether such individuals and groups can
meaningfully challenge reified trans discourses. Addressing specifically my second
sub-question, I will explore the mechanics of ridicule in virtual environments as
described by Alice E. Marwick’s model of “Morally Motivated Networked Harassment”
21 and Kesji Take et al.’s additive proposal of “Continuous Narrative Escalation,” 22 as
well as various analyses of the broader phenomenon of cringe by Katherine Anne
Schell,23 Melissa Dahl24 and Natalie Wynn.25 Here I will argue for a conceptualization
of cringe as a mutable property which invests trans discourse, and show how the
construction of this affect is highly significant to trans thought and practice.
In the third chapter, addressing my third sub-question, I will argue that the real-life
transspecies actors tragically branded as lolcows may, indeed, act as feminist
figurations that meaningfully contribute to trans discourse: not in the dehumanized
and farmed image of the lolcow, but in the transcendent figure of the trans bovine.
With this new figure I will emphasize in the same breath these actors’ claims to
cross-species ontologies, a disidentification with their fungible production of a
18 C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Violence,
Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife,” in: The Transgender Studies Reader 2, eds. Susan Stryker
and Aren Z. Aizura, Routledge, 2013, pp.66-76.
19 Juliana Huxtable and Bella Spratley, “Play with Truth” (interview), in: METAL, No. 43,
spring/summer 2020. https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/juliana-huxtable
20 The term furries refers to a global subculture with an interest in self-expression as
anthropomorphic, often cartoon-like animals, expressed for example through graphical online
personas (fursonas) and real-life costumes (fursuits). Therians are individuals who in some way
(psychologically, spiritually, socially, philosophically or even physically) identify as a nonhuman
animal.
21 Alice E. Marwick, “Morally Motivated Networked Harassment as Normative Reinforcement,” in:
Social Media+Society, April-June 2021.
22 Kesji Take, Victoria Zhong, Chris Geeng, Emmi Bevensee, Damon Mccoy and Rachel Greenstadt,
“Stoking the Flames: Understanding Escalation in an Online Harassment Community,” in:
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 8, Issue CSCW1, 2024, pp.1-23.
23 Katherine Anne Schell, “Rhetorical New Materialism, Queers, and Cringe,” Master’s thesis,
University of South Carolina, 2023. https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/7241
24 Melissa Dahl, Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness, Penguin, 2018.
25 Natalie Wynn, “Cringe | ContraPoints,” YouTube video, May 10, 2020.
11
spectacle of cruelty, and the possibilities within connective transversal language
shared between transgender and transspecies. Rather than shy away from the
disarticulation which these bovines have suffered, I will be emphasizing how a
specifically furry/therian praxis, despite (and perhaps through) the involuntary
employment of furries/therians as trans lolcows, reconfigures trans possibilities for
identification and connection. Drawing upon previous research on therians,
particularly by Devin Proctor26 and Jay Johnston,27 I will argue that these (and other)
putatively trans actors, who identify with and yearn for impossible physicalities which
are nonetheless inhabited in virtual and fictional environments, have problematized
progressive inclinations to view the efficacy of a figure within visibility politics as the
only salient metric for cross-identification within feminist thought. In this context, I will
be assessing the possibility of a pluralization of knowledge, as new figurative models
enter in productive tension with existing feminist figurations. Building upon earlier
writings by Donna Haraway28 and my thesis supervisor Katrine Smiet,29 I will be
juxtaposing the phrase Ain’t I a woman?, attributed to African-American civil rights
activist Sojourner Truth, to the therian question Ain’t I an animal? – especially insofar
as these identificatory claims intersect with transgender appeals to womanhood in
the tradition of Sojourner Truth. A trans bovine politics argues not for a resolution of
these tensions. Rather, I will be exploring how such an encounter with trans bovines
includes the capacity for a more intensive engagement with these tensions – and
thus a genuine politics.
26 Devin Proctor, “On Being Non-Human: Otherkin Identification and Virtual Space,” Ph.D. thesis,
George Washington University, 2019.
27 Jay Johnston, “On having a furry soul: transpecies identity and ontological indeterminacy in
Otherkin subcultures,” in: Animal Death, eds. Jay Johnston and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, Sydney
University Press, 2019.
28 Haraway, “Ecce Homo.”
29 Katrine Smiet, Sojourner Truth and Intersectionality: Traveling Truths in Feminist Scholarship,
Routledge, 2021.
12
1. THE COW-WOMAN
The cow-woman: introduction
In this chapter, I will be laying the groundwork for my figuration of the trans bovine,
by studying a transspecies figure that has been crafted and inhabited by an actor
highly cognizant of the philosophical themes relevant to such a transspecies
crossing – and through whom I will elaborate on the possibilities offered by such a
figure in confounding those dichotomies and hierarchies with which transspecies
literature is in tension.
Juliana Huxtable’s cow-woman
Juliana Huxtable, a Black transgender multidisciplinary artist, enacts a becoming
with 30 bovine as a strikingly intentional zoomorphic visual-affective practice. One of
the two texts with which I have prefaced this thesis was spoken by Huxtable in a
video as part of her exhibition “Interfertility Industrial Complex: Snatch the Calf
Back.” 31 The exhibition’s artworks and statements take us along the transspecies
journey of a character we only ever come to know as the “cow-woman.” Through
surgical procedures, the once-human farmhand girl has developed bovine skin
blotches and increased milk production capacities, then a bovine udder, then finally a
fresh set of hooves – all the while dreaming of the day when she might become
similarly subsumed into the agro-sexual empire of cattle farming as her teen idol
“Neorn.” The cow-woman also reminisces about how, as a still-human teenager, she
was charged with the task of sexually stimulating Neorn, in order to prepare the
heifer for artificial insemination – an act which soon led her to fantasize about being
sexually desired and handled in a similar way by her colleagues in the context of
animal husbandry.
The cow-woman shares this world of myth with fellow batlike-3-times-post-op32
transgressors of the species divide, as well as a host of critics and allies. Through
fictional all-caps gutter-press headlines (also part of the exhibition) we see her find
purchase in – to name but a few examples – the heterosexual matrices of zoophile
sentiments of men’s rights activists (“ ‘FEMALES ARE FEMALES!’ ZOOPHILE
PORNOGRAPHER DEFENDS CROSS-SPECIES HETEROSEXUALITY, GAINS
SUPPORT FROM MEN’S RIGHTS GROUPS”), corroborated by the cow-woman
herself (“GENETICALLY MODIFIED ‘COW WOMAN’ ATTACKS TRANS ACTIVISTS:
‘I MAY BE PART COW, BUT I AM A BIOLOGICAL FEMALE!’ ”), while imaginary yet
30 “If we appreciate the foolishness of human exceptionalism, then we know that becoming is always
becoming with – in a contact zone where the outcome, where who is in the world, is at stake.” Donna
Haraway, When Species Meet, University of Minnesota Press, 2008, p.244.
31 Huxtable and Spauldings, Interfertility Industrial Complex. A transcript of the section of the video
which I have quoted was also featured on the artist’s Instagram page, alongside one of the paintings
from the exhibition (Huxtable, untitled Instagram publicity post).
32 Besides the cow-woman, Huxtable’s exhibition features other fantastical creatures including a bat-
woman; also, the poetic press release for the exhibition includes the line “VAGINOPLASTY 3 TIMES”
(Huxtable and Spauldings, Interfertility Industrial Complex).
13
plausible feminists warn us of the danger the cow-woman would pose to
intersectional feminism (“ ‘PLEASE STOP’ – FEMINISTS PLEAD WITH COW
IDENTIFIED YOUTUBER TO LEAVE INTERSECTIONALITY ALONE”).33
Donna Haraway’s cyborg
I can think of at least one real-life feminist who may instead urge us to explore the
cow-woman further. As Donna Haraway wrote in her 1985 essay “A Manifesto for
Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” 34 by the late
20 th century the separation between human and animal was no longer found to be
anyway near as convincing as previously believed, as we learned more about
nonhuman animal languages, mental events and social behaviors.35 This border so
breached, Haraway invited us to contest the productions of meaning set in motion by
this increased closeness of humanity to animality. This unstable dichotomy is one of
the potentialities of Haraway’s “cyborg” figuration, which “appears in myth precisely
where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed.” 36
I present Huxtable’s cow-woman to you as one such cyborg which “signal
disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling” 37 between Huxtable and the heifer who
inspired her. The human/animal separation is but the first of three dichotomies
breached by Haraway’s cyborg figure. The second is the boundary between the
organic and the machinic – a boundary contested through such domains as modern
medicine, as it implants its synthetic/prosthetic machines in ever more intimate
contact with our bodies; contested through the increased agency which we must
start ascribing to these and other machines as they become more and more
autonomous.38 The third dichotomy breached by the cyborg is that between the
physical and the virtual: knowledge, power, and writing were always deeply
interconnected, but now our microelectronic devices respond infinitely faster than we
ever could to our shared stimuli in their own approach to infinitesimality, linking us to
fresh repertoires of signals, forever altering our meaning-making practices.39 Our
digital infrastructure is coupled directly to our affect, to our biology. Every child with a
smartphone in their hands is a cyborg. And as feminists, we have no choice but to
engage with this relentless cyborg reality, “through theory and practice addressed to
the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of
myth and meanings structuring our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of
disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the
self feminists must code.” 40
33 Huxtable and Spauldings, Interfertility Industrial Complex.
34 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.”
35 Ibid., pp.151-152.
36 Ibid., p.152.
37 Ibid., p.152.
38 Ibid., p.152.
39 Ibid., p.153.
40 Ibid., p.163.
14
Over the course of this thesis, we will see that the cow-woman indeed does not limit
herself to a transgression of human/animal boundaries, but in fact exists and
functions as a cyborg in breach of all three dichotomies. Cyborgs such as Huxtable’s
may thus allow us to inhabit “social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid
of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial
identities and contradictory standpoints.” 41 Yet, it would be a mistake to think of
cyborgs as benign figures acting solely towards the advent of a more beautiful,
complete, and holistic cosmos, considering how their “pleasurably tight coupling”
have just as readily been enlisted in the most oppressive of war machineries,42 or in
the problematization of humanist narratives which hitherto functioned as effective
rhetorical strategies towards largely progressive means.
Transnormativity
Already four decades ago, Donna Haraway saw in the cyborg – with precisely its
embrace of these contradictory manifestations of self – the ability to rewrite what
counts as woman’s experience.43 A cyborg reality contests any kind of naturalized
telos. Female no longer has an obvious root in biology,44 but must instead be read as
a “highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and
other social practices.” 45 Gender does not fare much better, as another of the
dubious achievements, alongside race and class, “forced on us by the terrible
historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism,
and capitalism.” 46 Transgender identity, likewise, loses its appeal to any clear born
this way validation. Some of its most effective historical pathological narratives,
especially those which called upon similarities between being born with the wrong
body parts and being born with somatic afflictions such as auto-immune diseases or
missing limbs – a perspective which was to no small degree popularized through
Dutch transgender care47 – have since fallen out of favor. Without such rhetorical
strategies which naturalize the transgender body, transness becomes naked to
politics, vulnerable to unsympathetic interpretations of its constructed cyborg nature.
41 Ibid., p.154.
42 Ibid., p.150.
43 Ibid., p.149.
44 More recent regressive political and judicial developments notwithstanding, for example the April
2025 ruling by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom that “the words ‘sex’, ‘woman’ and ‘man’ […]
mean (and were always intended to mean) biological sex, biological woman and biological man,”
further specifying that “[a]lthough the word ‘biological’ does not appear in [the] definition, the ordinary
meaning of those plain and unambiguous words corresponds with the biological characteristics that
make an individual a man or a woman. These are assumed to be self-explanatory and to require no
further explanation. Men and women are on the face of the definition only differentiated as a grouping
by the biology they share with their group.” Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, “JUDGMENT For
Women Scotland Ltd (Appellant) v The Scottish Ministers (Respondent),” 2025.
45 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” p.155.
46 Ibid., p.155.
47 Alex Bakker, Een halve eeuw transgenderzorg aan de VU, Boom uitgevers, 2020, pp.48-56.
15
One such interpretation, as Jay Prosser pointed out in his book Second Skins: The
Body Narratives of Transsexuality, is the routine dismissal of transsexuality by trans-
exclusionary feminist authors such as June L. Reich “as retrogressively conformist,”
48 usually on the grounds that “it works to stabilize the old sex/gender system by
insisting on the dominant correspondence between gender desire and biological
sex.” 49 Prosser also describes how authors such as Janice Raymond (who penned
the transphobic classic The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male) have
constructed a historical account in which “the transsexual is the gender-stereotypical
construct (and support) of a patriarchal medical establishment,” 50 thus reducing
transsexual51 experience to what Dwight Billings and Thomas Urban have described
as “a socially constructed reality which only exists in and through medical practice”
that “reflects and extends late-capitalist logics of reification and commodification,
while simultaneously reaffirming traditional male and female gender roles.” 52
Arguments like these revolve around a supposed naturalistic objectification of sex
organs as referential to some “true” state of man/womanhood (i.e. “I finally feel like a
woman after gender reassignment surgery”). Transsexuality here is made equivalent
to the invention and subsequent institutionalization of endocrinological practices
starting in the 1920s and 1930s, and of plastic surgeries after the Second World War.
This account of transsexuals as initially gender-disturbed individuals who have taken
the bait of the medical establishment removes any agency with which they may
encounter somatic bodily modifications.53 Finally, Prosser draws attention to how
such a reduction of the transsexual to medical practice paves the way for everyday
discrimination against that which is perceived as unnatural, and thus for how
transphobia hinges on this focus on the supposed constructedness of transgender
subjects.54
C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn, in their 2013 essay “Trans Necropolitics: A
Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife,”
similarly argue that “The discursive construction of the transgender body – and
particularly the transgender body of color – as unnatural creates the precise moment
where we as scholars, critics, and activists might apprehend a biopolitics of everyday
life.” 55 This recognition of the manner in which transgender women are thus folded
into biopolitical production comes paired with a critical perspective on the
48 Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, Columbia University Press,
1998, p.14.
49 June L. Reich, “Genderfuck: The Law of the Dildo,” in: Discourse, Vol. 15, No. 1, 1992, p.121.
50 Prosser, Second Skins, p.7.
51 Here, and at one point later in the text, I will be using the somewhat deprecated term transsexual
rather than transgender for the sake of consistency with the authors I am quoting. For the purposes of
this thesis, the two terms may otherwise be considered as synonymous.
52 Dwight Billings and Thomas Urban, “The Socio-Medical Construction of Transsexualism: An
Interpretation and Critique,” in: Social Problems, Vol. 29, Issue 3, February 1982, p.266, reprinted in
Blending Genders: Social Aspects of Cross-Dressing and Sex-Changing, eds. Richard Ekins and
Dave King, Routledge, 1996, pp.99-117.
53 Prosser, Second Skins, p.8.
54 Ibid., p.8.
55 Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” p.68.
16
construction of the transnormative subject. Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and Silvia
Posocco, in the introduction to the reader Queer Necropolitics hold that “While trans
people of colour in particular are still waiting for allies, the rise of the transnormative
subject – with its universalized trajectory of coming out/transition, visibility and self-
actualization – must also be interrogated in its convergences with biomedical,
neoliberal, racist and imperialist projects.” 56 Their account of this transnormative
subject builds upon the earlier notion of homonormativity, described by Lisa Duggan
as a “new neoliberal sexual politics” 57 of self-sabotaging effective gay constituencies
in favor of a depoliticized gay consumption culture. This new gay politics lost much of
its efficacy in its material, organizational and communal capacities, instead opting for
modes of support which were more formal and rhetorical. What makes this turn
normative is that it has lost its reach of support over queers from all walks of life in
favor of “an increasingly narrow gay, moneyed elite.” 58 The gender non-conformity
found in the transgender subject was deemed suitable by both women’s and gay
liberation assimilation projects as an Other to distance themselves from.59 We have
thus been direct victims of a homonormativity as well as an exclusionist feminism,
both of which saw in us imposters attempting infiltration. Yet, at the same time, we
remain rooted in a variety of gay and feminist political discourses, whose “uneven
institutionalization” 60 has co-produced this normative trans subject.61
From transnormativity to transspecies necropolitics
Terrible grounds: the zoo and the farm
A critique of necropolitical transnormativity attunes us to the dystopia of a trans
emancipation built at the expense of other queer lives62 – and how a reliance on
narratives of victimhood may end up making invisible the contradictory interests of
those exhibiting non-normative gendered behavior. Donna Haraway: “Cyborg
feminists have to argue that ‘we’ do not want any more natural matrix of unity and
that no construction is whole. Innocence, and the corollary insistence on victimhood
56 Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco, “Introduction,” in: Queer Necropolitics, eds.
Haritaworn, Kuntsman and Posocco, Routledge, 2014, p.4.
57 Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on
Democracy, Beacon Press, 2012, p.50.
58 Ibid., p.45.
59 Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” p.67.
60 Ibid., p.67.
61 Snorton and Haritaworn also find a specifically transnormative and necropolitical practice in how
(lethal) violence against the most vulnerable queer people – Black transgender women – has been
instrumentalized to push for hate crime legislation. The formulation and enforcement of these
measures, the authors argue, play upon stereotypes of vulnerability and weakness within targeted
communities, thus “contribut[ing] to a broader biopolitical imperative to manage poor people and
people of color by channeling them into a massive carceral project, a ‘prison industrial complex’,”
(Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” p.6in the end benefiting only those queer and trans
people already belonging to the “white citizenry” (Ibid., p.66) while placing poor and non-white trans
women in an even closer proximity to institutions which enable their suffering and punish their non-
normative gendered behavior.
62 Or: “where queer vitalities become cannibalistic on the disposing and abandonment of others.”
(Haritaworn, Kuntsman and Posocco, “Introduction,” p.2).
17
as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage.” 63 Snorton and
Haritaworn’s is not the only account of transnormativity, as captivity/death/suffering
are not the only logics of domination under which trans people exist. But it is where
we will start: on the farm.
In their essay “Impossibility of That,” Eva Hayward and Che Gossett64 invite us to
visit the zoo as described in The Book of Imaginary Beings by literary author Jorge
Luis Borges.65 The zoo functions as a “terrible grounds,” 66 and “the primal scene of
conquest, of nation building, and of state power,” 67 a carceral collection space in
which we, as exploring colonizers, confine beings we have ripped from their locales,
attributing to them new purpose at the same time as we name them. The modern
industrial farm, much like the zoo, repurposes living creatures such as bovines as it
taxonomically carves them up as milk cows, meat cows or breeding bulls. On the
farm, however, there are generally no children present for whom the conditions of
this prison must be made palatable. Unseen systemic domination, capture and death
instead become synonymous with human well-being. The industrial farm thus
constitutes not only a terrible grounds, but indeed a nonhuman variety of the human
“death-worlds” described by Achille Mbembe in his 2003 essay “Necropolitics” –
“new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to
conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.” 68
Tranimacies: animacy hierarchy and the nonhuman turn
Juliana Huxtable’s exhibition “Interfertility Industrial Complex” has been described by
Lillian Wolf as a critical engagement with transspecies reproduction and
categorizations of human/nonhuman,69 achieved through an exploration of “a context
of captivity and reproduction that is shared between fertile bovines and Black trans
femmes.” 70 Such analyses juxtaposing trans and animal have gained traction in
recent years following the nonhuman turn, an increased and multi-faceted interest
since 2013 in nonhuman ontologies within philosophy and social sciences.71 The
63 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” p.158.
64 Eva Hayward and Che Gossett, “Impossibility of That,” in: Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical
Humanities, Vol. 22, Issue 2, May 2017, eds. Eliza Steinbock, Marianna Szczygielska and Anthony
Clair Wagner, pp.15-24; republished in book form as Tranimacies: Intimate Links Between Animal and
Trans* Studies, eds. Steinbock, Szczygielska and Wagner, Routledge, 2021.
65 Jorge Luis Borges, “Preface to the 1957 Edition,” in: The Book of Imaginary Beings, Penguin, 1974.
66 Ibid., p.13.
67 Hayward and Gossett, “Impossibility of That.”
68 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” transl. Libby Meintjes, in: Public Culture, Vol. 15, Issue 1, January
2003, p.40. Snorton and Haritaworn’s “Trans Necropolitics” (and the broader concept of “Queer
Necropolitics” mobilized by Haritaworn, Kuntsman and Posocco) have been explicitly framed by these
authors and editors as extensions and applications of Mbembe’s original necropolitics, just as
Mbembe here explicitly built upon Michel Foucault’s earlier concept of “biopolitics” (as introduced for
example in “Il faut défendre la société”: Cours au Collège de France, 1976, Gallimard / Le Seuil,
1997).
69 Wolf, “Juliana Huxtable’s Cow-Woman,” p.247.
70 Ibid., p.249.
71 Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen, “Has the Queer Ever Been Human,” in: GLQ, A Journal of Lesbian
and Gay Studies, Vol. 21, Nrs. 2-3. June, 2015, p.203.
18
nonhuman turn has correctly identified a problem within critical thinking as being
dominated by human – and especially humanist, human-centric – thought; one of the
major insights of this turn is Mel Chen’s critique and politicization of the animacy
hierarchy, originally a term from the field of linguistics that “conceptually arranges
human life, disabled life, animal life, plant life, and forms of nonliving material in
orders of value and priority.” 72 Works inspired by this politicization emphasize
agency in nonhuman animals and even inanimate objects. Trans, animal, and the
animacy hierarchy finally all come together in the neologism Tranimacies. Writing in
the introduction to a 2021 reader of the same title, editors Eliza Steinbock, Marianna
Szczygielska and Anthony Clair Wagner state that “[w]ith tranimacies we seek to
provide a specifically transgender informed and conceptually trans* shaped
commentary on the ‘animal turn’ in humanities” and ask: “what are the possible,
imagined and visceral moments of intimacy between animal and trans studies
today?” 73 Tranimacies also builds upon the earlier concept of the “tranimal,” a term
coined by Lindsay Kelley that “articulates the labor and biocapital of crossspecies
organisms. […] Transdisciplinary in their pluralities, these indeterminate, disordered
forms secrete traces across disciplines and pollute categories. […] Trans- implies
interchange between both gender expression and genetic expression (tranimals are
said to ‘express’ their modifications). Their movement across categories […] binds
tranimals to other forms of trans- life, including humans.” 74
This broader concept of trans explored by Kelley and the authors and editors of the
Tranimacies reader thus denotes “experiences and practices that include beings in
transition, bodily metamorphoses, relating to your body through substances like
hormones, resistance to and transgression of clearly defined categories, falling out of
a taxon, being folded into the bio-medical-industrial complex, being on
display/exhibit, coming under a classificatory gaze, and having a stake in visual
politics of embodiment.” 75 With this formulation alone, we can see how transgender
people and transspecies actors such as the cow-woman may not be so far apart.
Tranimacies has thus provided a key point of departure for my thesis, from where I
set out to trace an account of the cow-woman as a cyborg breaching the
human/animal and animal/machine dichotomies. The cow-woman’s transness in
itself accounts for the various technological interventions into her biology, which slip
into one another until you can’t tell where her parents ended their shift, and the
surgeon and endocrinologist took over. Beyond being intimately connected to the
industrial milking machinery, the everyday milk-cow is herself a heavily genetically
engineered bio-machine, whose only purpose is a steady flow of milk. For cyborgs
72 Chen, Animacies, p.13.
73 Eliza Steinbock, Marianna Szczygielska and Anthony Clair Wagner, “Introduction: Thinking
Linking,” in: Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 22, Issue 2, May 2017, eds.
Steinbock, Szczygielska and Wagner, pp.1-10; republished in book form as Tranimacies: Intimate
Links Between Animal and Trans* Studies, eds. Steinbock, Szczygielska and Wagner, Routledge,
2021.
74 Kelley, “Tranimals,” p.226.
75 Steinbock, Szczygielska and Wagner, “Introduction: Thinking Linking.”
19
and/or tranimals, however, the deconstruction of hierarchies achieved by revealing to
us the animacy of nonhuman animals and even the inorganic is only half the battle.
Tranimal feminist figurations are more than allegoric works of fiction between
transgender and animal, they are crucially works of friction. As Dana Luciano and
Mel Chen wrote, the nonhuman turn does not proclaim that human and nonhuman,
upon closer inspection, will cease to exist. Rather, it asks “how these categories rub
on, and against, each other, generating friction and leakage. And it is also to ask
about other forms, other worlds, other ways of being that might emerge from the
transmaterial affections […] When the ‘sub-human, in-human, non-human’ queer
actively connects with the other-than-human, what might that connection spawn?” 76
Necropolitical reproduction
Cattle and chattel: the captive maternal, reproductive labor, and sensual desire
For Lillian Wolf, the tension which the cow-woman makes visible resides in a dual
recognition of pleasure as both a driving force for new modes of existence, and as
an emotion easily instrumentalized toward complicity in exploitative systems of
reproductive labor. To lay the groundwork for this analysis, Wolf first explores the
analogy between cattle and chattel, seeing both the milk cow and the enslaved
woman – here remembering Huxtable’s background as a Black American trans
woman – as a “reproductive laborer” 77 who cannot but participate in the production
of offspring that will continue to generate revenue for their masters – a perspective
that becomes more complicated as soon as the cow-woman opens her mouth and
lets out a pleasurable “neornnnnnn.” Though Wolf understands the agency of the
cow-woman as being continually violated, she also sees her “derive a complicated
pleasure from the violating desire of her captor” – still, “Neither Huxtable nor [Wolf]
are interested in asking whether pleasure exists or is possible in the historical
context of the Middle Passage and enslavement.” 78 Wolf then takes us to “the
present moment of anti-Blackness,” 79 to those everyday death worlds of “the
mundane and normalized violence of racism and gender normativity, the market, and
the prison-industrial complex” 80 as spaces which “might be better critiqued and
challenged through a critical lens of pleasurable feeling.” 81 The role of the
reproductive laborer – and in the case of enslavement, of the “captive maternal” 82 –
is not strictly synonymous with biological procreation. The maternal role expands
from rearing children to raising and nurturing them, as well as being “invested in the
76 Luciano and Chen, “Has the Queer Ever Been Human,” p.186.
77 Wolf, “Juliana Huxtable’s Cow-Woman,” p.252.
78 Ibid., p.252.
79 Ibid., p.252.
80 Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco, “Queer Necropolitics” (abstract), in: Queer
Necropolitics, eds. Haritaworn, Kuntsman and Posocco, Routledge, 2014.
81 Wolf, “Juliana Huxtable’s Cow-Woman,” p.252.
82 Joy James, “The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft, and the Captive Maternal,” in:
Carceral Notebooks 12: Challenging the Punitive Society, eds. Perry Zurn, Andrew Dilts and Bernard
E. Harcourt, Harcourt, 2016, pp.253-296. Cited by Wolf in “Juliana Huxtable’s Cow-Woman.”
20
reproduction of relationships and stability in their family and community units.” 83 This
extension of notions of reproductive labor is precisely what the titular “Interfertility”
insists on. The farmer is performing reproductive labor when they artificially
inseminate their heifers. By caring for the cow through sensual touch and the use of
lube, the farmer reduces stress in the cow’s reproductive system. In the context of
modern animal husbandry, milk-cow fertility is no longer an intra-bovine affair, nor a
purely biological matter. Calves are the offspring of cyborg parentage, mechanic and
transspecies.
We do remain with one question though: where are the calves? When does the cow-
woman engage in the promised titular “Snatching Back” of her offspring? She is
never with child, no hybrid babies are taken from her, her non-quadruped
imaginations feature a flat belly, and those imaginations featuring fuller bovine
bodies are focused on anal excretions rather than childbirth. What then could
possibly be stopping the cow-woman from scaling the highest rock she can find and
displaying her reclaimed prize for all to see? The answer lies in the cow-woman’s
(absent?) womb and (ambiguously featured) neovagina, which Wolf describes as
“presumably barren and bring[ing] no promise of eventual offspring, no embodied
economic futurity – but it is not a dead end – rather, it is an opening for thinking
about pleasure rather than procreation as the basis of reproduction and creating
sutured relations with other femme reproductive laborers.” 84 Notice here a crucial
similarity between cow-woman and transgender woman. We must conclude, as
Lillian Wolf (almost) does, that the calf does not refer to a baby cow, but rather to the
sum total of “the reproductive labor which transfeminine bodies undertake which
exceed bioreproducibility.” 85 When the cow-woman insists that she must be paid for
her labor, she is referring to sex work more than to biological reproduction. Yet, for
Wolf, the various ways in which women are dominated in reproductive economies
are not fundamentally different in the case of trans women. And so this extension of
reproduction beyond birth allows for the simultaneous entry of (infertile) trans women
into matrices of care as well as the sex labor market.
The cow-woman makes it clear that her desire to be bred like Neorn is what has led
her into this economy of reproduction, and why this desire in the context of animal
husbandry may be a complicated one. It is also clear to us how desire in trans
women might lead us to perform reproductive labor. But what is not so explicit in
Wolf’s text is exactly why transgender performing of reproductive labor might be a
bad thing sometimes. To substantiate her read, to learn how affect in trans feminine
subjects might lead them to partake in reproductive economies, and how this in turn
might lead to the production of transnormativity, I turn to Aren Z. Aizura’s contribution
to the 2014 reader Queer Necropolitics.86 For Aizura, reproduction is not only the
83 Wolf, “Juliana Huxtable’s Cow-Woman,” p.254.
84 Ibid., p.256.
85 Ibid., pp.255-256.
86 Aren Z. Aizura, “Trans Feminine Value, Racialized Others and the Limits of Necropolitics,” in: Queer
Necropolitics, eds. Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco, Routledge, 2014.
21
maintenance of a biological line of productive workers. Rather, economies of
queer/trans reproductive labor – especially sex work – are implicated in the
production of a specifically trans-deviant, heavily sexualized Other against which a
transnormative subject may be constituted. Regardless of any possible sensual
desire, it is first and foremost a much more mundane desire for economic survival
that leads trans feminine subjects into these reproductive economies which see
value in their non-normative sexualities and performances of gender. The cow-
woman’s reproductive labor then constitutes not only the direct sexual labor
extracted by the farmers, but also the imagery and narratives which spring from her
non-normative body. And it is precisely in these narratives and images that we find
the cow-woman breaching the cyborg’s third dichotomy – between the physical and
the virtual – but it is also where the cow-woman herself struggles directly under
constrictive interpretations of her unconventional desires.
The cow-woman as a satire of visibility politics
Lillian Wolf provides us with a read of the cow-woman rooted specifically in the cow-
woman’s perspective of her farm, her own “terrible grounds”:87 “understanding
pleasure as complicated, never separate from a relation of power, resists the
romanticization of the body and allows for a shifting, multifocal view into what justice
might look like.” 88 I hold that such an understanding of the relevant terrible grounds
is of critical importance for cyborg figurations, as these must make “an argument for
pleasure in the confusion of boundaries” while also accounting “for responsibility in
their construction.” 89 Yet, Donna Haraway also warns that wariness of our past – and
potential future – missteps might end up distracting us from “the confusing task of
making partial, real connection,” 90 and she reminds us that “illegitimate offspring are
often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.” 91
This task of making connections, specifically with non-normative agents, is crucial to
the method of feminist figuration. In a recent interview, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju
asked Juliana Huxtable how she generally feels about self-portraiture, and how she
landed on the use of these “interspecies avatars.” 92 The answers to these questions
are, for Huxtable, connected. One of the pitfalls of figurative art,93 she says, is that it
can potentially trap the artist into a role of diplomat for the marginalities on display,
“particularly figuration that […] rests on the representation of someone’s bodies as
87 Borges, “Preface to the 1957 Edition.”
88 Wolf, “Juliana Huxtable’s Cow-Woman,” p.261.
89 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” p.150.
90 Ibid., p.161.
91 Ibid., p.151.
92 Juliana Huxtable and Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, “Artist Talk: Unleash Your Imagination: Journey Into
the Unknown with Juliana Huxtable,” YouTube Video, Dec 17, 2024, 10:22.
93 In the context of visual art, the term figuration denotes artworks (particularly paintings, drawings
and sculptures) that represent real-world objects, including humans, animals and machines; the
opposite of figurative art is abstract art.
22
something that’s inherently virtuous,” 94 art that gets caught in a wave of anti-identity
politics sentiments, that needs to exactly tiptoe this line of criticality, to please a
variety of agendas and sentiments in the art world. For Huxtable this is not only
exhausting for the artist, but there is also a limit to the effectiveness of such focus on
representational strategies. In an earlier interview with Bella Spratley, Huxtable said:
“Snatch the Calf Back, for me, was a lot of things […] about visibility economy and
identity politics and being in an era in which so many things are being read through
the context of visibility […] it is assumed visibility is the same as the shifting of
political, economic and cultural resources.” 95
The cow-woman as a human/nonhuman cyborg: dancing on terrible grounds
The way Huxtable hopes to get out of this minefield of frameworks is through
intersection of the human and the nonhuman, through forms of media which overlay
her and her models with that of anthropomorphized animal imagery, through artistic
mythological morphings that craft new imaginary beings, hybrids, cyborgs – so that
the “intersection of the human and the non-human, even just as a […] conceptual
space” possibly “sidesteps the kind of overwrought nature of the frameworks that
people engage [with] portraiture and especially self-portraiture.” 96
Huxtable here is especially interested in this human/nonhuman intersection, where it:
Historically, politically and culturally appears in discourse countering same-sex rights –
as if same-sex marriage would lead to bestiality. Or, if you let men identify as women, or
women identify as men, then you might as well let anyone identify as an animal, as a
dolphin or a tarantula. So, I asked myself, what is at work in the anxiety surrounding
that? Also, activist resistance to conservative ways of thinking for the inclusion of identity
rights inspired me. The encounter between human and animal became an interesting
way for me to think about the limit of the representational matrix. What are the contours
and hard boundaries of what we think of as physical and worthy of visibility? 97
With this in mind, I argue that we should not be so hasty to frame the engagement of
the cow-woman with the milk industrial complex as mere complicity in real or
imagined modes of power. She gives us no reason to believe that she does not
surrender herself willingly, on her own terms: industrial sex becomes visible in her
rejection of innocence and her reciprocation, artificial insemination becomes an
expensive dildo with real ejaculation lubricant. She finds intimacy with industry and
distribution, and she affirms their virility in a manner that a full human could not have
grasped – beyond merely calling attention to plantations or cattle farms as terrible
grounds. Huxtable opens up our thinking on this industry as deeply sexual in nature,
by rejecting her status as a pure victim of mass carceral species rape. Instead, to
have fun and be willing to fuck on terrible grounds. To dance on terrible grounds, and
to invite others to join in the dancing and fucking. To form intricately informed
94 Huxtable and Ilupeju, “Artist Talk,” 11:41.
95 Huxtable and Spratley, “Play with Truth.”
96 Huxtable and Ilupeju, “Artist Talk,” 13:32.
97 Huxtable and Spratley, “Play with Truth.”
23
intimacies between trans and animal, as joyous survival amidst terror, as a complex
negotiation of affects which the cow-woman is ready to engage.98 The terrible
grounds that I concern myself with here, rather, is the matrix of representation which
the cow-woman enters – how the cow-woman’s cyborg status does not matter at all
once the politics of representation gets its hands on it – how she is immediately
folded into existing dichotomies of biology, sex and gender – how she comes to act
as a claim to normalcy for straight zoophiles – how mere representation ends up
trapping her in what Haraway called “the manic compulsion to name the Enemy” 99 –
and finally, how the name of that enemy ends up becoming that of a presumed sister
in suffering: transgender. In this satirical read I see Huxtable find coalition with
similar cyborg creatures of text, flesh, and synthetic fur. Transspecies beings who
resist necropolitical analysis, yet have a vested stake in a visual politics of
embodiment which does not treat them kindly.
Facetious furries: from the litter box hoax to anti-furry legislation
By: Gerdes H.B. No. 4814
A BILL TO BE ENTITLED
AN ACT
relating to the display of and allowance for nonhuman behaviors in Texas schools.
BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF TEXAS:
SECTION 1. This bill may be referred to as the Forbidding Unlawful Representation
of Roleplaying in Education or F.U.R.R.I.E.S Act.100
This proposed legislation, filed on March 13, 2025 by Stan Gerdes, member of the
Texas House of Representatives (Republican), would ban any nonhuman behaviors,
ranging from barking, to wearing artificial tails or ears, to “using a litter box for the
passing of stool, urine, or other human byproducts” or anything else which deviates
from “behaviors or accessories typically displayed by a member of the homo sapiens
species.” The specific mention of litter boxes perpetuates a hoax that has been
endlessly circulating in North-American right-wing spheres, and frequently
regurgitated by government officials eager to drum up moral panic.101 The litter box
98 Much as the transgender subject knowingly – even, one hopes, joyfully – steps into a role fraught
with danger.
99 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” p.151.
100 Stan Gerdes, “A BILL TO BE ENTITLED: AN ACT relating to the display of and allowance for non-
human behaviors in Texas schools,” 2025.
101 As just one example, Minnesota Republican State Senator (and candidate for Governor) Scott
Jensen mused: “Why are we telling elementary kids that they get to choose their gender this week?
24
hoax has been criticized and debunked by numerous columnists and essayists as an
indirect slippery-slope attack on transgender people, expressed in the form of
outrage that “apparently refusing to play along with the kitty delusion is tantamount to
‘misgendering’ a student confused about their gender.” 102 That furries are little more
than casual roadkill on the highway of bigotry is further evidenced by the relative lack
of anti-furry legislation, as H.B. 4814 seems to be only the second anti-furry bill
proposed in the United States.103 By contrast, at the time of writing, 101 anti-trans
bills have not only been proposed, but passed and signed into law.104 One of the
main angles taken in debunking the litter box hoax has been to disentangle furry
from transgender. Gail De Vos, writing on the pervasiveness with which these litter
box claims have dug their claws into political discourse, even outside of conservative
circles, thus notes the nonsensicality of conflating the transgender community with
furry culture, arguing that “Furries don’t identify as animals; they identify with
animals.” 105
The cow-woman: conclusion
Over the course of this chapter, I have grappled with my first research sub-question
through the figure of the cow-woman, exploring how such a tranimal figure may help
reveal the shared subjugations at the intersection of trans and animal studies. To this
end I have introduced the notion of transnormativity, especially in its intersection with
necropolitics, showing how normative modes and narratives of queerness and
transness are weaponized toward the othering of queers who fall outside of these
modes and narratives. Next, I have introduced the notion of tranimacies to ask how
transgender and transspecies might fit together within such sites of (necropolitical)
subjugation. Following Lillian Wolf's account, the transspecies cow-woman reveals
possible tensions which can arise in the pursuit of sensual trans desires, as trans
people are placed in reproductive labor economies. Building on this account, I have
argued that the cow-woman likewise reveals normative tensions between
Why do we have litter boxes in some of the school districts so kids can pee in them, because they
identify as a furry? We’ve lost our minds. We’ve lost our minds.” (Scott Jensen, quoted by Andrew
Kaczynski, “Minnesota GOP nominee for governor claimed kids are using litter boxes in schools – it’s
an internet hoax,” CNN, October 3, 2022. https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/03/politics/scott-jennings-
minnesota-schools-cat-litter-box. See also: Arturo Garci, “GOP Gubernatorial Hopefuls Regurgitate
‘Students Identifying as Cats’ Smear,” Truth or Fiction, 2022. https://www.truthorfiction.com/scott-
jensen-heidi-ganahl-furries/)
102 Gail De Vos, “Furries in Canadian Schools and Beyond,” in: Contemporary Legend, Series 4,
Vol.2, June 2024, p.4. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/cl/article/view/38421
103 As far as I can ascertain through online research, the only other bill proposed at time of writing is
the earlier Oklahoma House Bill 3084, introduced in 2024 by state representative Humphrey
(Republican): Justin J.J. Humphrey, “An Act relating to schools; prohibiting certain students from
participating in school curriculum or activities; […] providing for removal of the student by animal
control services […],” Oklahoma State Legislature, 2024.
104 Trans Legislation Tracker, “2025 anti-trans bills tracker.”
105 De Vos, “Furries in Canadian Schools and Beyond,” p.1.
25
transgender and transspecies actors when they both enter economies of visibility,
legibility, and legitimacy.
Over the course of the next two chapters I will explore how entry into these
economies by the real-life figures of furries and therians may be included in trans
thinking and writing. I will argue for a trans bovine politics that considers tranimal
desires and the image of the furry/therian as intimately entangled concerns. I will
draw attention to the economies of ridicule in which the image of the furry/therian
circulates, and ask how this image interacts with normative notions of transness.
With furries/therians I will investigate those “contours and hard boundaries of what
we think of as physical and worthy of visibility” 106 revealed and problematized by my
next bovine, the lolcow.
106 Huxtable and Spratley, “Play with Truth.”
26
2. THE LOLCOW
Laughter is the compromise attitude man adopts when confronted by something whose
appearance repels him, but which at the same time does not strike him as particularly
grave.
– Georges Bataille107
The lolcow: introduction
In this chapter, I will be analyzing the figure of the lolcow; highlighting the mechanics
of labeling something or someone as cringe, whether in specialized online
harassment communities, or more broadly in mainstream online culture; exploring
how this labeling interfaces with transnormative politics; and asking to what degree
the interplay between cringe and transnormativity further reinforces harassment
against trans(-adjacent) groups and individuals. I will also be examining to what
extent transnormative politics may be motivated by feelings of visceral disgust, rather
than by genuine concerns for transgender well-being.
Originating on online forums in the early 2000s, the word lolcow is generally
understood as “a derogatory slang term used to describe an individual who is
deemed highly exploitable and therefore susceptible to [harassment] due to their
display of gullible behavior online.” 108 This exploitability would be due to the target’s
perceived eccentricities and willingness to serve as a virtual milk cow (or better still,
cash cow) endlessly producing outrageous content, thus generating a potentially
infinite stream of entertainment or lols.109 Any emotional outbursts, regrettable
decisions, or otherwise vulnerable moments are preserved forever online. Lolcows
are thus actors whose very existence is so laughably off-kilter from the rest of us that
pretty much any behavior they exhibit, once marked, can be milked as a near
endless stream of revenue. For harassers of the lolcow this revenue is in the first
place social: clicks, likes, and engagement on forums which constitute a space for a
series of negative interactions that perpetuate the status of non-normative individuals
as laughing stocks. With a big enough audience, such engagement may even turn to
monetary revenue. By the mid-2010s, the term lolcow had become closely
associated with the online forum Kiwi Farms, which Kesji Take et al. have described
as a platform specifically designed to facilitate the harassment of individuals and
communities, often resulting in the website being forced offline by authorities or
service providers.110 Besides the aptly named Kiwi Farms, the lolcow’s “terrible
107 Georges Bataille, “Madame Edwarda,” originally published in French (Jean-Jacques Pauvert,
1956), transl. Austryn Wainhouse, in: Evergreen Review, Vol.8, No.34, December 1964.
108 Know Your Meme, “Lolcow,” n.d. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/lolcow
109 “LOL is an abbreviation for ‘laugh out loud,’ ‘laughing out loud’ or sometimes ‘lots of laughs,’ used
in messages to convey laughter. Since its first use online in the 1980s as a slang term, LOL has
become one of the most popular abbreviations on the web and is common knowledge among most
internet users.” Source: Know Your Meme, “Lol,” n.d. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/lol
110 Take et al., “Stoking the Flames,” p.3.
27
grounds” 111 include more widely known platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, 4chan,
Twitter, or any other loosely moderated user-based forum. Individuals branded as
lolcows have been the victims of some of the most extreme, extensive, and
systematic bullying practices ever seen on the internet. Once pegged as a target,
lolcows are harassed, stalked, publicly exposed, and on a handful of occasions
driven to suicide, which some of Kiwi Farms’ members openly state as one of their
goals.112
Christine Chandler: the lolcow of lolcows
Christine Chandler, more widely known as Chris-Chan, an autistic trans woman and
the second speaker I introduced at the very beginning of this thesis, is widely
regarded as “the victim of what is quite possibly the longest running and most
obsessive Internet trolling saga of all time. She’s the lolcow of lolcows.” 113 Despite
her status as arguably one of the most intensively documented people alive,114 in her
infamy Chandler has found herself within a veritable disinformation vacuum,115 to the
degree that the most reliable biography I could find is by video essayist Natalie
Wynn, more commonly known by the name of her YouTube channel ContraPoints:
They began tormenting her by creating pornographic parodies of Sonichu,116 posting
candid photos of her, et cetera. Chandler reacted to the trolls, which of course
encouraged them more, and the harassment escalated and escalated. They hacked her
accounts, or tricked her into giving out passwords, they posted all her emails online.
They showed up in person and photographed her house. They called her parents posing
as friends, psychiatrists, journalists, employers, in order to extract as much information
about her as possible. […] For all the information they gathered, the trolls created a Wiki
[…] devoted to the obsessive compiling of all Chris-Chan data. It includes a detailed
diagram of her bedroom, entire articles about all members of her immediate and
extended family, pages of psychiatric records she was tricked into sending them, and
that’s only the beginning […] Two female trolls actually went on real-life dates with Chris-
Chan, of course secretly wearing wires to record their conversations. Others pretended
to be her Internet girlfriends so they could solicit and post nudes and masturbation
videos. The absolute low point came when some trolls encouraged a 13-year-old boy to
pose as a 19-year-old girl and have phone sex with Chris-Chan and record it. In other
111 Borges, “Preface to the 1957 Edition.”
112 Kevin Veale, Gaming the Dynamics of Online Harassment, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp.87-106.
113 Wynn, “Cringe,” 31:32.
114 “In their more grandiose moods, the Christorians have speculated that Chris-Chan is the most
documented life in all human history.” Wynn, “Cringe,” 35:25.
115 Notably, there is no Wikipedia page on her. Apparently, such a page would only act as a magnet
for further harassment, to an extent that would outweigh the value of any verifiable information on
Chandler. (HaileJones et al., “Chris-Chan,” Wikipedia, 2023,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions/Archive_1199#Chris-Chan); others
(squid7012 et al., “Who is the most famous person who (as of Sept. 2024) does not have their own
Wikipedia page?,” Reddit, 2024,
www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/1fg2xik/who_is_the_most_famous_person_who_as_of_sept_2
024) have speculated that Chandler may be one of the most famous people alive without a Wikipedia
page.
116 Earlier in the video, Wynn introduced Chandler’s “comic-book series Sonichu, a childishly drawn
hybrid of Sonic and Pikachu.” Wynn, “Cringe,” 33:09.
28
words, they groomed a child to deceive an autistic person into performing sex acts for
their entertainment.117
Though Chandler is in all likelihood the most extreme and infamous example, the
term lolcow can be more generally applied to a wide range of modes and intensities
of harassment. Staple figures in YouTube “cringe compilations,” for example, also
function as lolcows; in some cases, an entire subculture may together comprise a
single co-operated lolcow.118 On Kiwi Farms, the landing page currently lists eleven
main subforums which point users to the hottest harassment nexuses. Among these
we find of course “Christian [sic] Weston Chandler” (with more than 697,000 posts in
ca. 3,700 threads at time of writing), as well as a variety of group categories
including “Animal Control” (referring to furries and therians, 380,000 messages in
354 threads) and “Stinkditch” (referring to trans women, more than 1,000,000
messages in 331 threads).
The farm cringe complex
The limits of figuration
I have begun this chapter by presenting the lolcow as a victim of othering and
harassment. My purpose, however, is not merely to show that there is some person
or community on the periphery of our discourses who we may compassionately wish
to include – someone who may be slightly, or significantly, weirder than us, but who
can still connect with our stories and should be supported by sharing in our
resources, technologies, and protection mechanisms. Though this is certainly a
driving force in my writing, what I really want to ask of the lolcow – keeping in mind
my research question and sub-questions – is whether this figuration may provide us
with some novel insight into trans discourses. Can the lolcow, in its bovine qualities,
connect us in some way to the experience of being milked – just as Lillian Wolf
inquires about the cow-woman? Might the actors branded as lolcows be considered
“ecstatic speakers?” 119 And the figure of the lolcow thus a feminist figure? Just as we
saw with Juliana Huxtable and the cow-woman? Such questions start, as they did
with the cow-woman, on the farm.
The lolcow and the cow-woman bear striking similarities in the repurposing of their
(re)productive capacities. For literal biological cattle, this repurposing occurs through
the enslavement of its species. For online cringe figures, it is through their being
milked for lols. Huxtable and her cow-woman, however, have feminist theory and
their widely appraised art with which to navigate and even stage-manage these
terrible grounds, whereas Chandler has only amateurishly drawn web comics and
barely intelligible YouTube rants. Intriguingly, both Chandler and Huxtable are
117 Wynn, “Cringe,” 34:11, 35:57.
118 Take et al., “Stoking the Flames,” p.3.
119 Haraway, “Ecce Homo.”
29
transgender, but neither the cow-woman120 nor the lolcow121 are. In the case of the
cow-woman this seems to be a deliberate action on the part of Huxtable, possibly
choosing to have her figure be in tension with transgender communities. In the case
of Chandler, the endless misgendering122 which takes place on her terrible grounds
is clearly not voluntary.
Even in this thesis, which will in all likelihood only be read by a handful of people, I
hesitate to press on further with the work of figuration – to possibly render myself
complicit in drawing further attention to the real, breathing, suffering individuals and
communities that embody the trans(-adjacent) lolcow. This is because there is a
violence to being read by actors who may not be fluent in the stylistic devices,
disciplinary angles, and terminologies of feminist figuration, as Rosi Braidotti calls for
us as feminists to be123 – but who are nonetheless capable of exerting considerable
moral power over the non-normative subjects described here.124 By focusing on the
irresistible figure of Chandler as the archetypal lolcow, I have already removed
myself one step from the figuration of “my own” transgender furry/therian lolcow.
Could I – indeed, should I – have instead selected one of many transgender
furries/therians who can readily be found on the “Animal Control” bestiary of Kiwi
Farms?
Furries and therians: giving “real” trans people a bad name?
I have already stated that individual members of furry and therian communities
should be considered as ecstatic speakers, in service of such figurations as furry or
therian. As I will further expand on in chapter 3, furry has been a human/animal,
animal/machine, physical/virtual cyborg, even since before Donna Haraway forever
reinscribed the term; and therian has been embodying an everyday form of
transspecies since before the nonhuman turn. Also (and as I can attest to from
personal experience), both communities have a proportionally massive transgender
population.125 For many transgender therians, including myself, transgender and
transspecies are very difficult to read apart. We might, then, have something to add
to tranimal thought. But there are some problems. Potential tranimals though we
120 At least, that is what the cow-woman herself seems to be telling us: “GENETICALLY MODIFIED
‘COW WOMAN’ ATTACKS TRANS ACTIVISTS: ‘I MAY BE PART COW, BUT I AM A BIOLOGICAL
FEMALE!’ ” (Huxtable and Spauldings, Interfertility Industrial Complex).
121 More precisely: though some lolcows are arguably or undisputedly transgender, most are not.
Transness (and particularly, transness that is judged to be poorly executed) is but one of many
vectors that mark one as a potential lolcow.
122 In fact, Natalie Wynn seems to be one of a very few willing to take Chandler’s claim to transness at
face value: see the block quote by Wynn in the next section: “Chandler is an autistic trans woman
[but] I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone actually take her transition seriously.” (Wynn, “Cringe,”
31:56).
123 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p.36.
124 Braidotti, for example in her figuration of the “nomadic subject,” is careful to avoid “romanticizing or
appropriating the exotic, the ‘other’,” instead deliberately drawing upon her own nomadic experiences,
her “own embodied genealogy.” (Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, pp.6-7).
125 Kathleen Gerbasi, Elizabeth Fein, Courtney Plante, Stephen Reysen and Sharon Roberts,
“Furries, therians and otherkin, oh my! What do all those words mean, anyway?,” in: Furries among
us 2: More essays on furries by furries, ed. Thurston Howl, Thurston Howl Publications, 2017, p.168.
30
might be, stereotypical lolcows we already are. Our image is steeped in cringe, and
more than that, specifically trans therians may do more harm than good in our
attempts to interface with transgender. Blaire White, a highly visible, militantly
conservative, and transnormatively transgender YouTube personality, neatly sums up
the moral panic:
I don’t like how all this stuff is called trans-species, transracial, trans-all-this-stuff,
because it really does muddy the waters of what transgender is […] my only beef is
when they say that it’s comparable to being transgender, or when people use this
against transgender people. […] Being a transsexual […] entails a very real medical
condition which is gender dysphoria […] obviously, I am biologically male and I am a
transsexual, but in the general society in the world I’m just some chick. […] you can’t just
be a deer and just roll up on someone and start eating their grass. […] because I felt like
a lot of people on Twitter were trying to say: ‘there goes trans people being crazy again!’
[…] but I don’t think it’s because she’s trans; I think it’s because she thinks she’s a deer.
Right? 126
Over the course of this thesis I have used the term transnormative subject. We might
say that the transnormative subject, too, is a figuration and thus a fiction. In this case
not a feminist one, but one employed by assimilative practices that barely require an
ecstatic speaker to keep the whole fiction afloat127 – yet, Blaire White is more than
willing to fulfil that role. Her issue here is with transspecies actors who adopt a
broader trans identity, which she fears may be conflated in some way with her own
transsexuality, or even weaponized against transsexuals such as herself. White also
points out one of the critical differences between transspecies and transgender –
that there simply is no possibility of passing, i.e. of being perceived by the casual
observer, through one’s appearance and behavior, as belonging to the intended
category. With some luck and effort, one might be able to pass as a man or a
woman, but how can anyone born human ever hope to pass as a deer?
Returning to Christine Chandler: Chris-Chan is almost trans, sometimes trans,
temporarily trans, perhaps even definitely trans if she had not achieved notoriety on
Kiwi Farms: but most importantly, the fiction that is Chris-Chan was poorly
transgender. Blaire White, in another video titled “I Am.. Disgusted. Chris Chan:
‘Trans’ Predator,” elaborates:
Chris Chan, the subject of today’s video, is… ‘trans?’ – and the reason I say… ‘trans?’ is
because this person has self-identified as a tomgirl intersex female soul with a male
body, a tranny cross-dresser, and a lesbian-identified male, not to mention this person’s
alleged transition consists of taint128 piercings, wearing menstrual pads, taking
medication to treat menopause (which is not recommended or useful for transition),
cutting his own genitals with a box cutter at home because the internet told him to,
126 Blaire White, “No, You Can’t Identify As A Deer (Trans-Species),” YouTube Video, May 26, 2020,
7:06. https://youtu.be/ajpedaMw9sc
127 As we have seen in Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” as well as Aizura, “Trans
Feminine Value.”
128 Perineum.
31
claiming to be trans to, quote, to get more girls, and being the wife of the pokemon
Mewtwo. So.129
Contrast this with the more sympathetic approach of another transgender YouTuber,
Natalie Wynn:
Chandler is an autistic trans woman, and yes, I will be calling her by she/her pronouns,
which I pause to explain because I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone actually take her
transition seriously. Most people seem to regard it as simply another absurd symptom of
her hilarious mental condition. In fact, a bunch of trans people will probably get real salty
with me for making trans people look bad by including Chris-Chan in our, oh, our very
prestigious and exclusive club. Oh please. Transsexualism is a deviant sexual identity
[…] how did trannies get so snobbish? Look, is Chris-Chan really trans? I don’t know,
and I don’t care. If Chris-Chan wants to be a woman, I for one support her journey. But it
doesn’t matter. The relevant thing about Chris-Chan is not Chris-Chan. It’s the fact that
for the last 13 years, nearly every aspect of her life has been obsessively archived
online by thousands of voyeurs known as Christorians.130
These two accounts differ dramatically in their understanding of the realness of
Chandler’s transition, which was similarly a major point of contention in White’s video
on our transspecies figures. The drive to mock Chandler and other putatively trans
actors seems be connected to a sincere desire to protect the intelligibility of the
category of transgender. A transnormative claim is thus being made here, and the
lolcows’ lack of adhesion to this norm is a key vector of cringe – but to what extent
can this normative claim, and indeed this cringe, be understood as the motivation for
harassment?
Methodologies of cringe and harassment
The affect of cringe: compassion and contempt
The intersection between queer and cringe is a surprisingly little-explored
phenomenon in academic literature131 – currently, the most prominent analyses and
taxonomies of cringe are found in pop psychology and YouTube video essays.
Melissa Dahl, in her self-help book Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness, begins
by traditionally defining cringe as an “intense visceral reaction produced by an
awkward moment.” 132 Beyond such basic emotional responses, however, cringe
may be understood as one of many complex affective experiences by which we
structure our imagination. Katherine Anne Schell, in her thesis “Rhetorical New
Materialism, Queers, and Cringe” describes cringe as a “full, complex affective
129 Blaire White, “I Am.. Disgusted. Chris Chan: ‘Trans’ Predator,” YouTube Video, Aug 3, 2021, 0:42.
130 Wynn, “Cringe,” 31:56.
131 In stark contrast to the prominence in queer theory of the somewhat related concept of shame. As
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote in 2003: “for certain (‘queer’) people, shame is simply the first, and
remains a permanent, structuring fact of identity: one that […] has its own, powerfully productive and
powerfully social metamorphic possibilities.” (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect,
Pedagogy, Performativity, Duke University Press, 2003, pp.64-65).
132 Dahl, Cringeworthy, p.3.
32
phenomenon.” 133 As an affect, cringe can no longer be relegated to consistent,
predictable emotional responses, but must be understood as a “flowing play of forces
involving human and nonhuman subjects and objects,” 134 an embodied yet mutable
response. And for queer people, such embodiments of cringe are no laughing matter.
Schell writes that: “Queer people have often been considered cringy, which is part of
why the phenomenon has such a nasty reputation in queer circles today; it is not
uncommon, especially in online spaces, to see calls for the death of ‘cringe culture’
or claims that queer liberation can never be achieved so long as queer folks live in
fear of cishetero contemptuous cringe.” 135 This “contemptuous cringe” – the first of
two types of cringe defined by Dahl136 – is precisely, according to Schell, what we
encounter in online public shaming “cringe compilation” videos.137 Which makes
sense, considering that Dahl’s second category of cringe – “compassionate cringe” –
is rooted in a sense of empathy, which is not a particularly strong basis for
harassment.138
Moral rationalizations for visceral disgust and normative harassment
Alice E. Marwick, in her paper “Morally Motivated Networked Harassment as
Normative Reinforcement” examines the sociological forces driving online
harassment communities, beyond obvious matters of systemic bias and general
visceral dislike: she indeed argues for an understanding of this kind of harassment
as morally motivated.139 Her two main arguments that are of interest to this thesis
are, first, that such moral justification within online harassment communities usually
takes the shape of an accusation, which in turn must describe a violation or a series
of violations of a social norm – though at this point, the explicit motivation to bring
this accusation forward may still be strongly rooted in personal bias, expressed
through a variety of “attack vectors” 140 as characteristics of the accused. These
attack vectors are often (though not always) “structural systems of misogyny, racism,
homophobia, and transphobia, which determine the primary standards and norms by
which people speaking in public are judged.” 141 Contemptuous cringe, I argue, can
thus be understood as an embodied how-to guide that provides those experiencing it
with viable attack vectors.142
133 Schell, “Rhetorical New Materialism, Queers, and Cringe,” p.16.
134 Ibid., p.16.
135 Ibid., pp.12-13.
136 Dahl, Cringeworthy.
137 Schell, “Rhetorical New Materialism, Queers, and Cringe,” p.12.
138 Ibid., p.12.
139 Marwick, “Morally Motivated Networked Harassment as Normative Reinforcement,” p.1.
140 Ibid., p.6.
141 Ibid., p.6.
142 Natalie Wynn lists a number of characteristics which increase the risk of an individual being
targeted by contemptuous cringe: “Deviancy, whether physical, mental, social, or sexual. A
combination of passionate sincerity and amateurism. The perceived tendency to lack emotional
composure. Obsessive interests in unconventional hobbies. Low social status. It’s pretty easy to wind
up in the cringe category these days. If you add up all the groups on this list, I bet it includes most of
the people watching this video.” (Wynn, “Cringe,” 17:16).
33
Second, Marwick argues that such moral claims may serve as a means by which
people solidify their attachment to various communities, including how these groups
themselves may signal who is part of the in-group, and who constitutes the out-
group.143 This concept may be useful for analyzing harassment targeted at lolcows.
Yet, Blaire White neither calls for harassment, nor does she appear to be particularly
outraged. She does, however, clearly display cringe. Within Marwick’s framework,
our ecstatic speaker Blaire White would be understood as an “amplifier,” an actor
who advertises accusatory discourses to a broader audience and so enables the
pile-on effect found in online forum harassment. White’s role in the spread of
contempt would thus be quantitative in nature, networking the cringe content to new
audiences. “Because amplifiers (highly followed nodes, in network terms) have so
many viewers, they are able, consciously or not, to direct harassing behavior. It is
often not the amplifiers themselves but those who follow them who engage in such
behavior, making it difficult to ascertain responsibility.” 144 Marwick holds that the
networked audiences of these amplifiers are typically not affiliated, or only loosely
so, with the initial sites of harassment.145 Since Blaire White exists within a different
network than that of Kiwi Farms, she does not necessarily operate with the same set
of attack vectors. Indeed, White’s experience of cringe may have a meaningfully
different quality to it. Wynn146 argues for a distinction between contemptuous out-
group cringe and contemptuous in-group cringe. Crucially, in-group cringe is
hypervigilant as to the manner in which individuals outside of one’s in-group may be
unable to distinguish between communities which share some distinguishing
features, but remain meaningfully distinct. In queer and trans contexts, this is
especially relevant considering the violence these communities may face. Thus,
concern for public image (typically linked to a sense of physical security for
transgender people), would in Marwick’s system provide the moral justification for in-
group harassment against non-normative trans behavior. Natalie Wynn points out
that “a lot of the biggest [trans] creators on [YouTube] have channels that are
basically devoted to exactly this type of cringe-reaction humilitainment.” 147 Wynn
reminds us in this context of the origins of Blaire White’s channel, as cringe-reaction
content regularly focusing on “transtrenders and crazy activists” who would
ostensibly be “giving real trans people a bad name.” 148 White’s desire to signal to
herself and to her audience that the cringeworthy individual is displaying behavior
considered either abnormal, or at least a worrying trend, within her own circles, thus
follows a mechanics of social belonging – which, in the case of online influencers, is
in all likelihood directly linked to economic gain. Both Katherine Anne Schell and
143 Marwick, “Morally Motivated Networked Harassment as Normative Reinforcement,” pp.3-4.
144 Ibid., p.7. Here Marwick builds upon and cites earlier research by Rebecca Lewis, Alice E. Marwick
and William Clyde Partin, “ ‘We dissect stupidity and respond to it’: Response videos and networked
harassment on YouTube,” in: American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 65, Issue 5, 2021, pp.735-756.
145 Ibid., p.5.
146 Wynn, “Cringe,” 47:14.
147 Ibid., 52:13. Wynn borrows the term “humilitainment” from Richard H. Smith, The Joy of Pain:
Schadenfreude and the Dark Side of Human Nature, Oxford University Press, 2013.
148 Wynn, “Cringe,” 58:14.
34
Natalie Wynn have suggested, however, that a projection of trans in-group cringe
onto broader society will in all likelihood grossly overestimate the degree to which
cringe actors are actually responsible for exacerbating the precarious status of
transgender communities,149 and may even, counter-productively, lead to an
increase in out-group contempt towards transgender people at large.150
Escalation of harassment: in-group and out-group cringe
Kesji Take et al., zooming in specifically on patterns of harassment on Kiwi Farms,
focus less on the function of normativity in harassment, and more on the ongoing
creation of normativity through harassment. Their model of “Continuous Narrative
Escalation” 151 considers an actor such as Blaire White not merely as an amplifier
external to the actual network of harassment, but as a node in a broader network,
meaningfully adding to the narrative of harassment.152 In her reaction to existing
cringe content, White postulates and networks further moral justifications, which may
have otherwise remained relatively contained within trans circles. Trans-specific in-
group cringe thus meaningfully extends the possible repertoire for moral justifications
beyond those typically linked to homophobia/transphobia, deploying further
justifications which may be significantly more difficult to refute. Thus, Blaire White
may make use of transnormative rhetorics of the kind described by C. Riley Snorton
and Jin Haritaworn,153 calling on the vulnerability of her own transgender body in the
present political climate.
Charlie Markbreiter, in an essay titled “Other Trans People Make Me Dysphoric,”
similarly suggests: “transness could only be mainstreamed into American life if trans
people could also be partitioned into those who could be assimilated and those who
couldn’t. In other words, those who were surplus, inconvenient, cringe.” 154 According
to Markbreiter, labeling something cringy is “a deeply political claim” 155 of
proclaiming who “deserves access to the social body and its rapidly shrinking
resources.” 156 Furthermore, Take et al. suggest that the moral systems of a given
community are highly flexible: when new moral justifications are constructed or
imported, these may alter the social norms of the community moving forward.157 One
consequence of these more dynamic views on cringe and harassment is that we
must consider in-group cringe and out-group cringe as being strongly informed by
each other. On a more hopeful note, Markbreiter argues that “Since cringe operates
as a form of social control, it can only be overcome collectively.”
149 Wynn, “Cringe,” 53:31.
150 Schell, “Rhetorical New Materialism, Queers, and Cringe,” p.23.
151 Take et al., “Stoking the Flames.”
152 Ibid., p.5.
153 Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” p.68.
154 Charlie Markbreiter, “ ‘Other Trans People Make Me Dysphoric’: Trans Assimilation and Cringe,”
The New Inquiry, March 1, 2022. https://thenewinquiry.com/cringe/
155 Schell, “Rhetorical New Materialism, Queers, and Cringe,” p.14.
156 Markbreiter, “ ‘Other Trans People Make Me Dysphoric’.”
157 Take et al., “Stoking the Flames,” p.2.
35
The lolcow: conclusion
Through an analysis of the figure of the lolcow, I have here addressed my second
sub-question: can perceived frictions between transgender and transspecies actors
be understood as mere rationalizations of socially induced cringe responses? By
applying studies of online harassment forums to transnormative/transspecies-
exclusionary narratives, it became clear that transnormative rhetoric can in and of
itself reflect genuinely held beliefs. However, we must also note the potency of
transnormative accusations as moral justifications for harassment (both within and
outside specialized harassment communities), and how voicing such accusations
might increase the status of the accusers within their own communities. Additionally,
since in-group cringe is a constructed affective phenomenon, we should be wary of
uncritically accepting the emotive aspect of cringe as a driver for trans politics –
especially considering that the practices spawned by in-group cringe appear to be
dubious in their political effectiveness, and are highly informed by the structural
biases found in online harassment communities.
36
3. THE TRANS BOVINE
The Trans Bovine: introduction
In the previous two chapters I have begun a process of juxtaposing the cow-woman,
as an academically informed tranimal artwork, with popular cultural transspecies
actors: lolcows, furries and therians. The cow-woman and the lolcow are both
problematic figures, inhabiting unresolved tensions within queer discourse rather
than attempting to arrive at any “cohesive political ideology.” 158 Although my analysis
of the politics of Juliana Huxtable’s cow-woman eventually departs in many regards
from that of Lillian Wolf,159 our reasoning is largely the same. Further, where Wolf
animated the cow-woman through the affect of sensual trans femme desire, I have
animated the lolcow through the affect of cringe, with a particular focus on anxieties
of transspecies identification.160 These anxieties cannot be entirely explained by
cringe, but a read of in-group cringe may provide a more holistic understanding of
the affective processes involved in defining which kinds of transness are considered
real and worth representation within trans discourse and queer scholarship. Stripped
down to its bones, this is the exact definition of transnormativity. Understanding how
we may be seduced into believing that such normativities are not only on the right
side of trans history, but that they would also possess a more informed
understanding of said history, may help us interrogate our own affective responses
as we encounter possible queer feminist figures.
A less ambitious thesis could very well end here, with the conclusion that the lolcow
and the cow-woman meaningfully add to academic trans theory by affording
potentialities of re-opening feminist discourses. However, as Rosi Braidotti wrote,
critique and deconstruction are but the first steps within feminist figuration: “feminist
theory is not only a movement of critical opposition of the false universality of the
subject, it is also the positive affirmation of women’s desire to affirm and enact
different forms of subjectivity.” 161 Beyond revealing discursive short-circuits and
rhetorical impasses, feminist figures teach us new languages and behaviors outside
those of Enlightenment humanism. Thus, to provide a more philosophically relevant
answer to my main research question, and more specifically my third sub-question, I
wish to not only reveal how transnormativity intersects with cringe to subjugate those
it excludes, but also what we may learn from specifically cringe tranimals
themselves. To do so, this chapter will investigate the most cringe of claims made by
especially therian tranimals: that they indeed are themselves non-human animals. I
will ask what this claim, in and of itself, may add to trans and animal academic
inquiry – a process which begins with a declaration: Ecce bovo.
158 Huxtable and Ilupeju, “Artist Talk,” 13:15.
159 Wolf, “Juliana Huxtable’s Cow-Woman.”
160 Huxtable and Spratley, “Play with Truth.”
161 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p.158.
37
Ecce bovo
In the New Testament (John 19:5), Pontius Pilate presents Jesus to the crowd and
proclaims “Ecce homo”: behold the man. There are varying interpretations of this
gesture, but the most common one is that Pilate wished to have the crowd see Jesus
as merely a man, not a god-king. “Ecce bovo” is also a nod to Donna Haraway’s
seminal 1992 essay juxtaposing the figures of Jesus and Sojourner Truth; the full title
of the essay, from which I am quoting extensively in this thesis, is “Ecce Homo, Ain’t
(Ar’n’t) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Post-Humanist
Landscape.” 162 It seems to me that an appeal similar to Pilate’s “Ecce homo” is
made wherever furries and therians enter discourse: “Ecce bovo” 163 may thus be
interpreted as “behold the foolish man who thinks himself to be cow; I have
examined him, and I find no crime in him.” The lolcow is Jesus, the users posting on
Kiwi Farms are the crowd outside the palace in Jerusalem, and the well-meaning
progressives are Pilate. The picture is complete when Jesus / the lolcow is,
regardless of the appeal to humanity made by Pilate / progressives, crucified.
Taking Blaire White up on her grievances,164 and exploring the anxiety between
transspecies and transgender as Huxtable does,165 both require that we sit with
those furry/therian figures who do claim their animal status. Furry and therian
communities exist in and around each other, sometimes in tension, usually in
symbiosis. One key difference between the two groups is that a therian directly
identifies with or as a specific animal (usually an existing species found in nature)
through their theriotype;166 whereas for furries, identities are formed through the
creation of personalized fictitious characters, fursonas, that are based in some way
on animals, but take on much more cartoon-like shapes.167 Where furries typically
express a certain kinship to their fursonas and the animals these are based on,
therians typically claim that they are indeed their theriotype species to some
meaningful extent. How exactly this therian identification manifests may vary widely
between individuals, as I will discuss momentarily. For now, my focus is on this
cross-species claim to identity, the naming oneself animal. Haraway suggests that
“the only route to a nongeneric humanity, for whom specificity – but emphatically not
originality – is the key to connection, is through radical nominalism. We must take
names and essences seriously enough to adopt such an ascetic stance about who
we have been and might yet be.” 168 And so, I ask, what kind of potentialities are
unlocked when we as academics take therians at their word? When we look at
discursively crucified transspecies actors and exclaim “behold the cow who you see
162 Haraway, “Ecce Homo.”
163 I have borrowed the noun bovo from the Catalan and Esperanto languages. The Esperanto word
means “head of cattle” (an individual cow, bull, heifer, ox, etc.). The Catalan word means “fool” or
“simpleton;” its etymology derives from the Latin “balbus,” meaning “stammering.”
164 White, “No, You Can’t Identify As A Deer (Trans-Species).”
165 Huxtable and Spauldings, Interfertility Industrial Complex.
166 The species of animal that a therian identifies with.
167 Proctor, “On Being Non-Human.”
168 Haraway, “Ecce Homo,” p.88.
38
in the guise of man, I have examined it and find that it is indeed a cow!” When we, as
Jay Johnston does, consider therians as actors who are “proposing (and living) a
form of transpecies identity” that “undermines the categorical distinction of ‘human’
and ‘animal’ ”? 169 For transnormative subjects such as Blaire White, even attempting
to genuinely address such questions would constitute a careless appropriation of
transgender appeals to identity. Yet I will argue that an examination of the efficacy of
such claims starts with a cross-analysis of a much earlier appeal: that of Sojourner
Truth.
169 Johnston, “On having a furry soul,” p.297.
39
Ain’t I a woman?
Dat man ober dar say dat women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober
ditches, and to have de best places – and ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm!
… I have plowed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me –
and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much as any man (when I could get it). and bear
de lash as well and ain’t I a woman? I have borne five children and I seen ’em mos all
sold off into slavery, and when I cried with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus hear – and
ain’t I a woman?
– Sojourner Truth, speaking at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, 1851,
transcribed 12 years later by Frances Dana Barker Gage, cited by Donna Haraway in
“Ecce Homo.” 170
Sojourner Truth (ca.1797-1883) was a key figure in the movement for the abolition of
slavery in the United States, and in later social issues including African-American
civil rights, women’s rights, and alcohol temperance. The specific words which Truth
spoke in 1851 are highly contested. Other transcripts do not even include the
question “Ain’t I a woman?,” though it is under this title that the speech is mostly
known today. Donna Haraway nonetheless asks us: “Why does her question have
more power for feminist theory 150 years later than any number of affirmative and
declarative sentences? […] For me, one answer to that question lies in Truth’s power
to figure a collective humanity without constructing the cosmic closure of the
unmarked category.” 171 This “unmarked category” refers to a humanity in the generic
figure of “modern white patriarchal discourse,” 172 from which Sojourner Truth was
automatically excluded “as a black female, a black woman.” 173 But Truth was also
excluded from the “discourses of (white) womanhood,” 174 a category further marked
in and of itself, as constituting “the one who can never be a subject, who is plot
space, matrix, ground, screen for the act of man.” 175 Truth’s Black femininity instead
marked her as “female (animal, sexualized, and without rights), but not as woman.”
176 Even as white women suffered under an unfreedom of forced reproductive labor
in order to “give birth (unfreely) to the heirs of property,” 177 Black women suffered
under a further unfreedom in which their forced reproductive labor had them give
birth to children who, just like themselves, would not even inherit the status of
human.178 Though woman was thus not fully human either,179 Truth’s question could
nevertheless work to introduce the radical specificities of her body, names and
speech into this unmarked humanity through her appeal to the marked category of
170 Haraway, “Ecce Homo,” pp.90-91.
171 Ibid., p.92.
172 Ibid., p.93.
173 Ibid., p.92.
174 Ibid., p.91.
175 Ibid., p.92.
176 Ibid., p.93.
177 Ibid., pp.94-95.
178 Ibid., pp.94-95.
179 Ibid., p.94.
40
woman.180 Yet, even as Sojourner Truth demands recognition of her womanhood,
she does not prescribe new boundaries for the category. Instead, by articulating
precisely her differences from (white) womanhood, Truth was able to contest what it
means to be a woman and a human.
Ain’t I a fluctuating identity? The politics of instability, irony and contradiction
When categories of identification are extended to actors previously denied that
identification, there are two possible angles of critique. The first is the normative
position, which holds that such an interrogation of categories will destabilize them
beyond practical use – that by losing their specificity, these precious categories will
collapse into relativism. Precisely this, Katrine Smiet argues, is one the reasons why
trans-exclusionary feminists dread the inclusion of trans women into the category of
woman, a move they believe would destabilize the previously biologically validated
category to the point where it would become “impossible to name specific forms of
gender oppression.” 181 From another perspective, Smiet reasons, there are
concerns that any affirmation of categories such as womanhood will result in further
stabilizing of the normative relations embedded in these categories. Denise Riley, for
instance, argues that in the present day and age we would do well to move on from
such reified categories, and instead place more emphasis on the changing nature of
our identities, as she rewrites Sojourner Truth’s question to “Ain’t I a fluctuating
identity?” 182 Smiet, however, maintains that affirmation and negation of the category
of woman go hand in hand:
[Sojourner Truth’s] question itself, I argue, performs two key feminist moves: on the one
hand, critically interrogating, and on the other hand, critically affirming the category of
‘woman.’ On the one hand, by questioning who is and who is not included in the
category of ‘woman’ and exposing the norms that govern dominant understandings of
womanhood, the question works to expose the ideological character of the category
‘woman’ itself. […] On the other hand, the question itself does not perform a detached
critique of the category ‘woman,’ but instead carries within it an investment in the very
identity that is being questioned and interrogated. In the face of societal exclusion from
this identity, a claim is made to this identity nevertheless.183
This insistence on inhabiting a category while simultaneously critiquing it is essential
to the kind of feminist figurations which Haraway brings forward. It is what keeps
Sojourner Truth’s claim from acting as a normative device (as we find in
homonormativity/transnormativity) in any meaningful sense. It is similarly crucial to
Haraway’s figuration of the cyborg, which begins with a call for more ironic rhetorical
approaches to feminist praxis.184 Irony, for Haraway, “is about contradictions that do
not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding
180 Ibid., p.92.
181 Smiet, Sojourner Truth and Intersectionality, p.81.
182 Denise Riley, Am I That Name?: Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History, Springer,
1988, p.1.
183 Smiet, Sojourner Truth and Intersectionality, pp.70-71.
184 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” p.149.
41
incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is
about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method.”
185
Transgender is just such an extraordinary ironic cyborg, insisting on its inhabitance
of the category of woman while simultaneously dislodging it.186 It is no surprise then
that precisely these words of Sojourner Truth have been reiterated and reframed by
trans activism. In an interview cited earlier in this thesis, Juliana Huxtable critiqued
the idea that increased visibility of high-profile transgender individuals would have a
meaningfully positive impact on the quality of transgender lives: “Like, if [Black
transgender actress] Laverne Cox in a H&M campaign implies ‘that’s a win for all
trans people,’ it is assumed visibility is the same as the shifting of political, economic
and cultural resources.” 187 Smiet, approaching Cox from a different perspective than
that of Huxtable, notes how Cox has deployed the figure of Sojourner Truth, one of
the blueprint feminist figurations, to argue for her own trans visibility, “explicitly
connect[ing] her own claim to womanhood to that of Truth, exclaiming: ‘I stand here
in the tradition of Sojourner Truth – claiming my womanhood within a context which
would often deny it’.” 188 For Smiet, it is by “voicing the question anew from her
specific positionality as a black transgender woman [that] she adds a new layer and
resonance to the question that could not be heard before.” 189 In doing so, the ironic
tension between the “critical interrogation of woman, and on the other hand, the
critical affirmation of woman” 190 is acknowledged once again. Smiet notes that
readings of Sojourner Truth’s question as an intrinsically queer or trans statement,
may lead themselves to be misunderstood as moving the focus away from Black
feminism toward trans feminism191 – see for example Eva Hayward and Che
Gossett’s statement that a reframing of “Black feminism and black thought as always
already trans have troubled the categories of binary gender and of medically
assigned sex for their historical and contemporary violences.” 192 Smiet instead
argues for an understanding of Truth’s question as containing “within it a critique and
re-envisioning of the category of woman that opens the door [to] current trans
interventions.” 193 What, then, if therians were to do the same thing? Might they also
speak through Sojourner Truth’s words, and ask: Am I not animal?
185 Ibid., p.149.
186 For a brief history of the use and misuse of Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” in trans
literature, see: Hilary Malatino, “Biohacking Gender: Cyborgs, Coloniality, and the
Pharmacopornographic Era,” in: Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 22, Issue 2,
May 2017, eds. Eliza Steinbock, Marianna Szczygielska and Anthony Clair Wagner, pp.179-190;
republished in book form as Tranimacies: Intimate Links Between Animal and Trans* Studies, eds.
Steinbock, Szczygielska and Wagner, Routledge, 2021.
187 Huxtable and Spratley, “Play with Truth.”
188 Smiet, Sojourner Truth and Intersectionality, p.82.
189 Ibid., p.83.
190 Ibid., p.84.
191 Ibid., pp.82-83.
192 Hayward and Gossett, “Impossibility of That.”
193 Smiet, Sojourner Truth and Intersectionality, p.83.
42
Ain’t I (this) animal?
Facetious furries: cute, cuddly, corporate and carnal
Yet, when a therian asks Ain’t I animal?, this is an entirely different appeal than
Truth’s – or, for that matter, Cox’s – Ain’t I a woman?. Mel Chen, for example,
questions the efficacy of furries and therians in their ability to critically interrogate
and destabilize human-centered narratives and the categories of human/animal.
Particularly dubious in this regard is the tendency among the furry fandom to focus
exclusively on cute, funny and otherwise relatable animals, on “seemingly
predictable paths of recourse to animal becoming,” as a result of which “popular
furries figures are much more based on rabbits, cats, and dogs than on, say, lizards,
eagles, and centipedes.” 194 Perhaps even more problematic are generalizations of
furry subculture as being essentially sexual or pornographic – tropes which furry
scholar Brandy Juniper Lewis has attributed to “a representation of furries’ being
consumed by mass media’s abjecting gaze” 195 into “a stage for pornographic and
[ill]icit excess.” 196 Lewis links such puritanical disdain to what she sees as a further
general misappraisal from academia, and calls instead for “a more personal, more
affectively involved engagement with fan materials” in order “to see what outside
scholars and conservatives still miss with regards to fandoms’ numerous potentials.”
197 I am by and large in agreement that stereotypes of (my own) sexual deviance are
the source of much of the contemptuous cringe directed at furries and therians.198
More broadly, any such reductive readings privilege a gut response that marks trans
bovines as frivolous, fungible, and instinct-driven beings who do not even seem to
realize that they are setting themselves up as perfect lolcows – and who, I would
argue, also do not seem to appreciate the degree to which they are willfully and
critically engaging with difficult themes. Therians may seem, as Jay Johnston puts it,
to be little more than “a faddish, perhaps even quaint or fashionable subculture.” 199
Yet Johnston also urges her readers and fellow academics, rather than dismissing
the community outright, to appreciate how its “relationships and [its] critique of the
human can offer potentially useful renegotiations of the concept of subjectivity and
how relations with radical difference (alterity) are lived.” 200
194 Chen, Animacies, p.106. Though Chen only explicitly mentions furries, most of their criticism
similarly applies to therian practice.
195 Brandy Juniper Lewis, “Untaming Fandom: Funny Animal Figures and the Page-Based World of
Furries,” Ph.D. thesis, University of California Riverside, 2024, p.54.
196 Ibid., p.1.
197 Ibid., p.54.
198 Consider, for example, Blaire White’s statement that “I have this rule in life, if something just
doesn’t make sense, it’s probably a sex thing, it’s probably a fetish […] whenever I really, truly, just do
not understand someone’s, like, behavior, I just assume it has something to do with sex. And I’m
usually right.” (Blaire White, “The Furries of TikTok: I Am Very Afraid,” YouTube Video, Oct 13, 2022,
6:30. https://youtu.be/gwxVAK7QYFE). Or, for that matter, Natalie Wynn’s tongue-in-cheek remark
that “Transsexualism is a deviant sexual identity” (Wynn, “Cringe,” 32:24).
199 Johnston, “On having a furry soul,” p.307.
200 Ibid., p.307.
43
Dehumanization: queerness, Blackness and animality
Much more problematically, however, and beyond mere puritanical disdain or
contemptuous cringe, the question Ain’t I an animal? may seem a gross inversion of
the slavery abolitionist slogans Am I not a man and a brother?, Am I not a woman
and a sister?, and of course, Ain’t I a woman? – statements formulated as questions,
but which in fact proclaimed the humanity that had been so thoroughly denied to
generations of enslaved Black people.201
Mel Chen, in discussing the efficacy of furry/therian figurations in the project of
problematizing animacy hierarchies, argues that
[…] limiting ourselves to reworking the philosophies of animal-human dependencies, or
the ethological studies of a particular animal, or this or that human-animal relationship,
carries certain risks: namely, the importing of historical racializations and queerings (or,
indeed, imperial tropes) that subtend the very humans and animals under discussion.202
Similarly, Jessica Ison203 critiques animal studies which attempt to attach queer to
animal:
We need to consider the practical ramifications of such an extension of queer: Could it
inadvertently marginalise those who inhabit the inheritance of queer bodies that
historically have been expelled, confined, and discriminated against? […] We can see
queer animal studies trying to reimagine, recreate and indeed queer both animal and
queer as a category. But in using the queer person to make this argument, they are
perhaps replicating and inverting the way that queer theory has used the animal.204
Ison’s main misgiving about any overlap between the fields of animal and queer
studies is that they may end up merely co-opting each other, rather than drawing
attention to their shared subjugation within environments dominated by necropolitical
logic.205
Lillian Wolf’s analysis of Juliana Huxtable’s cow-woman is highly attuned to this
necropolitical subjugation. Therian and furry communities, however, lack such a
basis in necropolitics, however terrible our grounds in cringe culture may be. As
Lupa, author of A Field Guide to Otherkin,206 stated in an interview with Devin
Proctor: “There’s not like a huge bunch of people getting disowned by their families
for being Otherkin. There’s not legislation against Otherkin. There’s individual
bullying and there’s 4chan, but nobody has gone and murdered somebody they were
dating when they found out they were Otherkin.” 207 Laverne Cox, on the other hand,
201 Haraway, “Ecce Homo,” p.91.
202 Chen, Animacies, p.106.
203 Jessica Ison, Queer and Animal Provocations: Homonormativity, Animal Exploitation and Sexual
Violence, Lexington Books, 2025.
204 Ibid., p.26.
205 Ibid., pp.21-22.
206 Lupa, A Field Guide to Otherkin, Megalithica Books, 2007. Otherkin is an umbrella term for
individuals who identify in some way as a nonhuman being. This usually includes therians, and
usually does not include furries.
207 Lupa, interviewed by Proctor, “On Being Non-Human,” p.117.
44
is able to invoke the spirit of Sojourner Truth because of her own specific
positionality not just as trans, but as a Black transgender woman. That I myself, as a
white trans woman, now call upon these figures and movements – specifically to
interface with the overwhelmingly white208 furry and therian communities I find myself
invested in – requires a careful and explicit acknowledgement on my part of the
context of Black subjugation. Crucially, politics like those of the trans bovine must
always remain cautious, as Abraham Weil argues, of any equation between
Blackness and animality:
I argue that it is critical to intervene in discourses that associate blackness with animality
in ways that devalue black lives by forcefully withdrawing their humanness precisely
because such a move both makes the human exceptional (placing the human above the
animal and all else) and because it reinvests in animacy hierarchies that place both the
human and animal in the fungible state of exception. The analytic of trans*, which in
some spaces has taken up animality as a point of disruption in these very devaluing and
delegitimizing politics, must also recognize these moves as risky and be attendant to the
ways in which blackness and the animal are choreographed. Thus, linking trans* to
animality is always already associated with blackness. Black and trans* are not
disparate categories when invoking animacy, but rather are inextricably linked.209
Thus, in order to arrive at a trans bovine politics that includes the capacity to engage
with the difficult themes that exist presently within the discourses of real-life
transspecies actors, the various contributions and interpretations of necropolitical
theory must somehow find their way into any analysis of cringe economies. This is
why I have explicitly opted for the contentious phrasing Ain’t I animal?, which
preserves the cultural and historical grounds of the originary Black210 and trans
questions. Moreover, it preserves the tension between a Black interrogation of
humanity that is directly paired with an affirmation of that same humanity, and a
therian rejection of humanity in favor of an affirmation of animality. I also wish to
argue that therian thinking and practice are far removed from productions of the
other-than-human as being anything less than human, since therians are in fact
208 Furscience, “1.2 Ethnicity.” https://furscience.com/research-findings/demographics/1-2-ethnicity/
209 Abraham Weil, “Trans*versal Animacies and the Mattering of Black Trans* Political Life,” in:
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 22, Issue 2, May 2017, eds. Eliza Steinbock,
Marianna Szczygielska and Anthony Clair Wagner, pp.191-202; republished in book form as
Tranimacies: Intimate Links Between Animal and Trans* Studies, eds. Steinbock, Szczygielska and
Wagner, Routledge, 2021.
210 As an aside, I am also drawn to this phrasing because it highlights a shared trouble of authorship
and specificity between Sojourner Truth and the trans bovine. Haraway has described this ubiquitous
transcription of Truth’s words and question as “the falsely specific, imagined language that
represented the ‘universal’ language of slaves to the literate abolitionist public, […] the language that
has come down to us as Sojourner Truth’s ‘authentic’ words.” (Haraway, “Ecce Homo,” p.97). This is a
language that Sojourner Truth, in fact, almost certainly did not speak. For Haraway, such a
generalization of Truth’s words “sneaks the masterful unmarked categories in through the back door
in the guise of the specific, which is made to be not disruptive or deconstructive, but typical.”
(Haraway, “Ecce Homo,” p.97). The trans bovine as a lolcow similarly struggles with such issues of
translation, especially through the heavy editing and decontextualization which their words suffer in
online cringe environments, rendering every trans bovine into a fungible lolcow rather than a unique
creature.
45
deeply respectful of the animal figures of their theriotypes. It is only within cringe
economies that trans bovines are forcefully de-animated, and may thus be
instrumentalized in the subsequent (necropolitical) de-animation of Black and trans
actors. Weil argues that “it is not the rhetorical use of the animal, per se, that justifies
analogous placement of the black or trans* human and animal on the auction block
but rather (in both cases) it is their forced inanimacy that renders them available for
sale and slaughter.” 211
Corporeal affirmation
It is precisely this forced de-animation that makes many a therian into a lolcow.
Devin Proctor argues that “the central problem for the Otherkin is not that therians
identify as other-than-human, but that their bodies do not match that identification.”
212 For most of my readers, a statement such as “I can speak, I live in a city and
wear clothes and sleep in a bed – am I not an animal?” will seem a perfectly logical
claim to make in the context of evolutionary science, which tells us that all humans
are of course animals – of the species homo sapiens. Yet, ironically, therian claims to
animality, to being this specific animal, an animal of a different species than human,
are much more problematic. When the therian asks “Am I not animal?,” the subtext is
understood as: “I sometimes walk on hands and feet, I wear a mask and an easily
detachable prosthetic tail, and I meet up with my pack six times a year to run and
play in the forest – am I not a wolf?” Here, regardless of whether the therian question
“Ain't I an animal?” can meaningfully interrogate the category of animal, and
regardless of any misgivings one might have about the therian choice to affirm
animality rather than humanity, we might question whether therians can even affirm
the category of animal – considering that neither the subtext of the therian question,
nor the therian’s own physicality, appear able to extend the category of their selected
theriotype over to their human bodies. It might appear that herein lies a key
difference between Truth’s question, and the therian’s question. Sojourner Truth
seemed to be able to rhetorically list the critical markers that had historically
excluded her from the category of woman: having done hard labor, having black skin,
having suffered horrifically brutal treatment, having seen her children sold off into
slavery – precisely because her body, even marked Black and female as it was,
would still have been recognized by Truth’s audience as a shape and a voice which it
must finally understand to belong to a woman; while a modern audience's glance at
a cow therian will merely reveal a human shape with some cow accessories.
However, for Katrine Smiet, Sojourner Truth’s question does not in fact “presume
‘womanhood’ as a given and stable category, into which Sojourner Truth – and with
her, other marginalized women – are to be simply included[.]” 213 Rather, Truth’s
question was necessary, precisely because her claim to womanhood and humanity
was by no means self-evident to a contemporary audience on the sole basis of her
211 Weil, “Trans*versal Animacies and the Mattering of Black Trans* Political Life.”
212 Proctor, “On Being Non-Human,” p.4.
213 Smiet, Sojourner Truth and Intersectionality, p.70.
46
bodily appearance. On the contrary, it was her body, marked as black and female,
that was understood to dehumanize her. Truth’s question was meaningful and
productive precisely because it problematized the existence of any pre-given
(physical) markers which need to be present before an affirmation of the category
can take place, thus “work[ing] to expose the ideological character of the category
‘woman’ itself.” 214 And so, in taking seriously the fundamental instability of the
categories of woman and human, it is no more self-evident that Sojourner Truth (or
any other women) are indeed women, than it is self-evident that therians are human.
Extra-corporeal affirmation
Nonetheless, there are a wealth of difficulties to be found in the specifically therian
claim to animality that arise from the therian’s relative lack of attributes that might
support their claim to the category of the non-human. For one, the otherness of any
other animal species to humans is of a rather extreme degree, even for those of us
who are used to thinking across alterities.215 Another difficulty is that, unlike for
transgender people, there are no technologies afforded to therians that could help
them overcome the hurdle toward a possibility of passing (i.e. of being casually
perceived) as their theriotype species, which would in turn make it sensible to pose
the question Am I not (this) animal to a wider audience. Such a lack of transspecies
embodiment does not, however, mean that therians do not transition in any material
way. Proctor writes that, precisely because passing is unattainable in this manner,
“the daily practice of Otherkinity is to align the relationship between identification and
corporeality.” 216 We should thus pay special attention to the “extra-corporeal means
(i.e. Internet technologies) [required] to reach a place of negotiated balance.” 217
Proctor calls this extra-corporeal practice of body-identity negotiation “open-bodied-
ness.” 218 As we saw in the previous chapter, it is precisely this difficulty of passing
that marks certain trans people as potential targets of harassment in cringe
economies. For Proctor, the open-bodied-ness of therians should make them natural
allies to those trans people who are, likewise, unable to easily resolve the tension
between their identification and their physical body.219 Proctor sees therian practice
as “the most clear and extreme example of body-identity negotiation,” and thus
exceptionally well suited as a topic of study for those interested in the broader
phenomenon of open-bodied identification.220
In this potential alliance between therians and non-passing trans people, both
struggling for the perceived viability of open-bodied identification, I find a formally
similar process as we have seen in the case of Sojourner Truth – even though we
are now operating within a new set of relevant social institutions, historical context,
214 Ibid.
215 Johnston, “On having a furry soul,” p.302.
216 Proctor, “On Being Non-Human,” p.4.
217 Ibid., p.5.
218 Ibid., p.28.
219 Ibid., p.vii.
220 Ibid., p.4.
47
discursive backdrop, and technologies. According to Katrine Smiet, “[Truth’s] speech
called attention to differences among women, and challenged the focus on white and
middle-class women’s concerns. Asking ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ Truth can thus also be
understood to be asking: who is the normative subject of feminism?” 221 This time,
however, there is no powerful existing, embedded category like that of woman to
which transspecies actors can make claim. Thus we observe therians as not only
problematizing the efficacy of visibility politics, but also posing a question: who is the
normative subject of trans identification? In other words: Am I not trans?
Ain’t I trans?
Species dysphoria
Whether or not there is indeed a therian claim to transness is in itself contentious.
Timothy Grivell, Helen Clegg and Elizabeth C. Roxburgh, in their 2014 survey
Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of Identity in the Therian Community,
found that “all participants experienced a discrepancy between how they felt on the
inside and their physical body. Also, similar to many LGBT individuals, the
participants identified a desire to ‘come out.’ ” 222 The authors also remarked that
“one of the most salient experiences that therians and transgendered individuals
have related to are the feelings of ‘being in the wrong body’ or species or gender
dysmorphia.” 223 It is worth noting that the diagnostic terminology of “gender
dysmorphia” (or more commonly “gender dysphoria,” the term used almost
universally both by clinicians and within the transgender community itself) has
supplanted here the earlier, highly stigmatizing and pathologizing concept of “gender
identity disorder.” 224 Earlier researchers of therians such as Kathleen Gerbasi et
al.,225 writing in 2007 in the journal Society & Animals, still mirrored the then-
prevailing terminology of “gender identity disorder” in their speculative “proposed
construct” of “species identity disorder.” This was heavily critiqued, for example by
Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, writing in 2011 in the same journal: “Species identity disorder
is modeled on gender identity disorder, itself a highly controversial diagnosis that has
221 Smiet, Sojourner Truth and Intersectionality, p.2.
222 Timothy Grivell, Helen Clegg and Elizabeth C. Roxburgh, “An Interpretative Phenomenological
Analysis of Identity in the Therian Community,” in: Identity, Vol. 14, Issue 2, 2014, pp.122.
223 Ibid., p.131.
224 For example, in the 2013 revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM-5): “Gender dysphoria is a new diagnostic class in DSM-5 and reflects a change in
conceptualization of the disorder’s defining features by emphasizing the phenomenon of ‘gender
incongruence’ rather than cross-gender identification per se, as was the case in DSM-IV gender
identity disorder.” (American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, Fifth Edition, American Psychiatric Association, 2013, p.814). Furthermore: “The current
term is more descriptive than the previous DSM-IV term gender identity disorder and focuses on
dysphoria as the clinical problem, not identity per se.” (Ibid., p.451).
225 Kathleen Gerbasi, Nicholas Paolone, Justin Higner, Laura Scaletta, Penny Bernstein, Samuel
Conway and Adam Privitera, “Furries from A to Z (Anthropomorphism to Zoomorphism),” in: Society &
Animals, Vol. 16, Issue 3, 2008, pp.197-222.
48
been criticized for pathologizing homosexuality and transgendered people.” 226
Natalie Bricker, whose analysis of Grivell et al., Gerbasi et al., and Probyn-Rapsey I
have largely echoed here, concludes that “the findings of Grivell et al. seem to
indicate that therians are able to cope with any discomfort they experience due to
their nonhuman identities and function effectively in society. In sum, based on the
little evidence available, it is inappropriate to label nonhuman identity as a disorder.”
227
Lupa, author of A Field Guide to Otherkin,228 ultimately stops identifying as therian, a
departure motivated by her perception that the therian community was shifting away
from kinship with one’s theriotype toward identification as one’s theriotype.229 We
may well question whether any move to consolidate open-bodied identification as
transgender experience runs the risk of relegating trans practice and identity to a
merely discursive realm. Jay Prosser, commenting on the state of academic thinking
at the time of writing of his foundational work Second Skins (199
theory has written of transitions as discursive but it has not explored the bodiliness of
gendered crossings.” 230 As I will argue momentarily, I do not believe this to be of
particular relevance when discussing therians; still, we can see how expanding the
category of trans to include therians can lead to difficulties beyond purely normative
accusations.
Devin Proctor argues that trans identification (even if imprecise) is useful as a
conceptual tool which helps others understand therian experiences.231 One of Grivell
et al.’s interviewees, for example, noted how much easier it would be to be able to
explain therianism as being akin to transgender, instead of being akin to furry.232
Such a desire for recognition may also extend into the realm of research: therians
frequently “see themselves as part of a long history of science’s vindication of
previously ridiculous notions, stretching as far back as heliocentric theories to
contemporary ideas about gender identity.” 233 Thus, where therian discourse and
self-understanding rely on previously transgender-specific notions of “species
dysphoria” and “wrong body” discourse, I argue that this in part has to do with the
difficulty of finding speech that communicates the affective leap of therians across
226 Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, “Furries and the Limits of Species Identity Disorder: A Response to Gerbasi
et al.,” in: Society & Animals, Vol. 19, Issue 3, 2011, p.294.
227 Natalie Bricker, “Life Stories of Therianthropes: An Analysis of Nonhuman Identity in a Narrative
Identity Model,” Senior thesis, Lake Forest College, 2016, p.17.
228 Lupa, A Field Guide to Otherkin.
229 “As time went on it felt more and more like it was people trying to literally prove that Otherkin exist
in a literal manner in the same way that for example transgender people exist.” (Lupa, interviewed by
Proctor, “On Being Non-Human,” p.117).
230 Prosser, Second Skins, p.6.
231 Proctor, “On Being Non-Human,” pp.260-261.
232 Grivell, Clegg and Roxburgh, “An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of Identity in the
Therian Community,” pp.122.
233 Proctor, “On Being Non-Human,” p.260.
49
species in a manner that is (usually) not deemed physical, and has no hope of being
effectively communicated as such to individuals outside of the subculture.
However, even as Proctor argues that open-bodied identification places therians in
proximity to the struggles of many trans people, he also remarks that “Otherkinity is
not quite animism,234 is also not quite trans* […] this inability to place Otherkinity
boggles people; it disturbs them to a point beyond anger, to disgust. They pretend to
think it is funny, but instantly distance it as pathological and abnormal, claiming
normalcy for themselves.” 235 As such, therians find themselves in a double bind.
Their open-bodied identification is seen as cringe and weaponized in anti-trans
rhetoric, even without any self-proclaimed proximity to transness. But when therians
attempt to use trans language to make their own methodology more palatable, they
open up new possible angles of ridicule for trans people, while additionally drawing
the wrath of actors of transnormative harassment such as Blaire White.
On becoming with: kinship vs. identity
A possible escape from such entanglements would be to adopt Lupa’s perspective,
and stress identification with over identification as: to promote the development of
therian techniques of kinship, while disavowing therian disidentification with
humanity. Proctor observes that “identifying in a certain way does not fulfill the need
that Lupa believes is at the heart of Otherkinity: a cultural yearning for the process of
play that we in America have lost.” 236 As Lupa explains to Proctor:
In dominant American culture, we do not have a good way for adults to play. We have
structured things like sports, but we don’t have more gentle curiosity type of play. And
we’re basically expected, once you’re an adult you leave behind the things of childhood.
… And so we don’t have a place or a way to explore the concept of the other, including
the sacred other. In Paganism we have that opportunity, at least on a temporary basis,
we have the opportunity to go into meditation. We have the opportunity to go into an
altered state of consciousness. We have the opportunity to invoke beings into ourselves.
But we don’t have a way of saying ‘I am kin to the wolves’ or ‘I am the sister of water’ or
‘I feel a deep kinship with this mountain.’ We don’t have a way to speak of that. We don’t
have a way to grieve when those things are lost.237
This being kin is precisely what Donna Haraway expressed as “becoming with,” and
what Eliza Steinbock et al. mean by “thinking linking.” 238 We might then ask if
therians need to be trans, or even transspecies, if we can already approach their
alterity from the vantage point of this kinship. In transspecies literature the possibility
234 On the link between Otherkinity and animism, Proctor writes, in the abstract of this same paper:
“Otherkin experience can be understood as a form of animism, yet it arises out of a post-
Enlightenment paradigm that rejects the infrastructural elements needed for animist thought (e.g.
magic, spirits, kinship with natural elements). The industrialized West simply does not have the
cultural vocabulary to comprehend the virtuality that is animist experience. What it does have are the
virtualities of language and of Internet technology.” (Proctor, “On Being Non-Human,” p.vii).
235 Proctor, “On Being Non-Human,” p.53.
236 Ibid., p.118.
237 Lupa, interviewed by Proctor, “On Being Non-Human,” p.118.
238 Steinbock, Szczygielska and Wagner, “Introduction: Thinking Linking.”
50
for relationality, in place of identity, is sometimes addressed through hyphenation of
the word, as trans-species: “A little hyphen is perhaps too flimsy a thing to carry as
much conceptual freight as we intend for it bear, but we think the hyphen matters a
great deal, precisely because it marks the difference between the implied
nominalism of ‘trans’ and the explicit relationality of ‘trans-,’ which remains open-
ended and resists premature foreclosure by attachment to any single suffix.” 239
Trans- here is not a stable identity, but rather a practice that might yield valuable
results when applied to a variety of previously bifurcated notions. The question Ain’t I
trans? makes much more sense when we understand trans in this relational
capacity. Certainly, such language centered on relationality might prove an effective
figuration through which to dispel the hierarchy between the human and the
nonhuman Other, while leaving some distance between transspecies and
transgender.
Open-bodied-ness: phantom and mental shifts
Yet, the need for an addition of the hyphen for trans-species/transspecies is precisely
such a site where we hash out which modes of transness are considered viable as
matters of identity, rather than as “mere” relational practices. Also, as Myra Hird and
Harlan Weaver have argued, these relational practices will likely be performed with a
different level of skill by transgender (as opposed to cisgender) people, as our
inhabiting of transness would provide us with a certain experience of practice at
engaging with the Other in their alterities.240 Something similar could be said for
therians, precisely when we behold them and declare Ecce bovo, thus taking them at
their word in their nonhuman (identifying as) animal form. Therians move beyond
mere textual gender/species performativity, precisely because this allows them to
attend to their desire beyond the textual in their continuous struggle with the
mismatch between self and body – a desire which carries within it a deference to an
unreachable physical transformation. Jay Johnston argues that in their sorrow over
this impossibility – i.e. in their species dysphoria – therians retain a sharp focus on
that which sets them apart from their theriotype.241 Proctor observes that this species
dysphoria often manifests as what therians call a “phantom shift, because of its
similarity to ‘phantom limb syndrome’ […] the sensory perception of a body part that
is not physically there” 242 – specifically, supernumerary phantom limbs that have
never existed on the physical human body243 but which are able to keep the same
body open to experiences which it could otherwise not have, for example: “to have
phantom wings is to remain open to all the actions of which wings alone are
239 Weil, “Trans*versal Animacies and the Mattering of Black Trans* Political Life,” p.330.
240 Myra Hird and Harlan Weaver, “Interchanges,” in: Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities,
Vol. 22, Issue 2, May 2017, eds. Eliza Steinbock, Marianna Szczygielska and Anthony Clair Wagner,
pp.217-232; republished in book form as Tranimacies: Intimate Links Between Animal and Trans*
Studies, eds. Steinbock, Szczygielska and Wagner, Routledge, 2021.
241 Johnston, “On having a furry soul,” pp.306-307.
242 Proctor, “On Being Non-Human,” p.203.
243 Ibid., pp.204-205.
51
capable.” 244 Another such shift, often experienced simultaneously with the phantom
shift, is the mental shift by which therians adopt “the mentality and thought
processes of the kintype.” 245 The therian’s open-bodied-ness thus facilitates their
connection to animality without surrendering to a relativism in which critical
differences between humans and their nonhuman theriotype species would be
lost.246 Their inability to fully become animal, outside of the ill-recognized methods of
open-bodied identification, thus draws them to critically interrogate the category of
animal at all times. In so doing, they also critique the boundaries of the category of
human, but from a perspective very different to that of Sojourner Truth.
In “Ecce Homo,” Donna Haraway proposes the figure of Sojourner Truth as a
counter-figuration to the Rational Man of Enlightenment humanism. According to
Dana Luciano and Mel Chen, this Rational Man is but one of several anthropocentric
figures problematized by the nonhuman turn.247 Another figure, especially of interest
to therians, is that of “the human as species”: “undergirded by evolutionary thought,
[…] both aligned with and hierarchically differentiated from other forms of life.” 248
This figure “refer at once to a putative ‘fact’ of (human) nature, the way things are,
and an ideal, a standard to aspire to, the way things should be.” 249 Yet, as the
authors of the nonhuman turn have pointed out, an increased understanding of the
complexities of interspecies connections and of “the impersonal nature of affect, as
opposed to the putatively personal implications of ‘emotion’ ” 250 leads to a “breaking
down of beliefs in species individuality” 251 – and of the structuring of life through
humanist fantasies of exceptionalism, built upon a misguided conception of nature as
the way things unchangingly are252 – in favor of new and queer understandings of
world-making.253
Furries and therians as physical/virtual cyborgs
The therian focus on methodologies of identifying as may allow for new productive
behaviors and languages outside of models of strict species separation – even as
the therian experience of dysphoria, in common with transgender people, provides
therians with a need to inhabit, and thus critically affirm, the category of animal.
Where transgender people simultaneously trouble and re-affirm gender through, for
example, a cyborg inclusion of pharmacological machines into our bodies, Proctor
sees therians as being able to breach the human/animal dichotomy using methods
afforded to them through a cyborg breaching of physical/virtual dichotomies.254
244 Ibid., p.205.
245 Ibid., p.172.
246 Johnston, “On having a furry soul,” pp.306-307.
247 Luciano and Chen, “Has the Queer Ever Been Human,” pp.189-190.
248 Ibid., p.190.
249 Ibid., p.191.
250 Ibid., p.191.
251 Ibid., p.191.
252 Ibid., pp.190-192.
253 Ibid., p.192.
254 Proctor, “On Being Non-Human,” p.30.
52
Digital avatars are a standard practice within furry and therian spaces, expressed
through a variety of media ranging from self-drawn or commissioned profile pictures,
to archives of written lore about one’s fursona or theriotype, to 3D-rendered avatars
that are brought to life through the user’s own bodily movements on virtual reality
(VR) platforms. Proctor positions such practices on what he calls a “spectrum of
virtuality,” 255 a “sliding situation of being-in-the-Internet, between poles of the
corporeal and the digital.” 256 If we consider therian practice as the most extreme
case of open-bodied identification, then VR experiences provide the most extreme
confusions of the physical/virtual boundary. Through full-body motion-capture
systems, the user’s body movements are directly translated into a social virtual world
where users connect with each other.257
For furries, this provides opportunities for roleplay with little risk of the limitations of
the physical body breaking the spell. For therians, it is a means of being their other-
than-human selves. Accounts of therian VR usage also showcase how the virtual
may bleed back into their corporeal bodies; for Proctor, therian experiences of
phantom and mental shifts are, in and of themselves, moments where the virtual
clearly expresses itself in the corporeal: “If avatar embodiment can be seen as
corporeality asserting itself in techno-virtual space, then the Otherkin phenomenon of
‘shifting’ presents the opposite: virtuality imposing itself on/through the corporeal
body.” 258 Proctor describes such shifts as an “avatar embodiment” 259 in the
traditional sense of the term within Hinduism as “a manifestation of a deity or
released soul in bodily form on earth; an incarnate divine teacher.” 260 Therians are
thus in an exceptional position of embodying both technological avatars and physical
avatars of animal souls.261 And – as the electronic avatars are approximations of the
user’s animal soul – wherever technology allows these users to creatively tweak the
appearance and expressivity of their avatars, the inner animal may morph in
tandem.262 In this communication, the techno-virtual comes to be expressed in the
corporeal – as the adaptations made to the techno-virtual are expressed in therian’s
mental and phantom shifts. Returning full circle to Donna Haraway’s figure of the
cyborg, it is precisely in such expressions of high-tech culture that “it is not clear who
makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine.” 263
For Jay Johnston, this aspect of therian practice calls into question any sharp
distinction “between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’.” 264 For Proctor, it further teaches
255 Ibid., p.vii.
256 Ibid., p.vii.
257 Ibid., p.170.
258 Ibid., p.56.
259 Ibid., p.169.
260 Ibid., p.171; Proctor quotes here the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word “avatar” and
also references its etymology: Sanskrit avatāra (अवतार), literally descent.
261 Proctor, “On Being Non-Human,” p.171.
262 Ibid., pp.173-174.
263 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” p.177.
264 Johnston, “On having a furry soul,” p.296.
53
us that open-bodied identification of therians is, in fact, still very much embodied.
Juliana Huxtable takes this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, arguing that there
is in fact no meaningful conceptual difference between (virtual) claims of identity and
transgender hormone replacement therapy, as both are simultaneously real and
fantastical metaphors of the body:
For me, yes, a person is their gender identity before they start taking hormones, so
hormones are just making a metaphor by taking flesh and pushing it towards a
metaphor. Every movement, every gesture, every intonation of your voice, every turn of
your head is an opportunity to define and radically shape or shift the presumed
relationship between your body, your flesh and what others presume it should be or
could be. So, there is not really a distinction between those two for me. When I say I
write from my body, it does not mean I use my body as something isolated and separate
from the larger questions of fantasy, history and performance, it’s that the body is the
avatar, and the avatar is as much in the data fields as the system it has come to
represent.265
The trans bovine: conclusion
Returning to my third sub-question: what might cringe transspecies actors, who are
not directly interfacing with trans theory, nonetheless contribute to trans thinking? To
answer this, I have brought forward the therian question Ain’t I animal?, asking how
this question might build upon historical claims to womanhood and humanity by
Black and trans people who have historically been denied such a status. Following
Sojourner Truth’s famous question Ain’t I a woman?, I have asked if therians might
achieve their claim to animality through the question Ain’t I trans?. Therians certainly
demonstrate transitional practices towards an inhabited identity, and are indeed
aversely affected by transnormative logics. This alone, however, is not enough to
declare that therian practice inhabits the category of trans in any meaningful, political
sense. Moreover, the claim to transness made by therians is more comparative than
declarative: their question is not so much Ain't I trans?, but rather Ain't I like trans?.
Still, I see therian practice as a real and embodied way of being transspecies,
containing transitional methodologies supported by a nominal and ecstatic claim to
being animal. What I have found is that it is in precisely the most cringeworthy
therian claim of identifying as animal that we are presented with new ways of
thinking trans – especially in the therian need to practice becoming with through
extra-corporeal means. Trans in the context of their animality, therians are trans
wolves, trans foxes, trans goats, trans porcupines, trans dogs, trans cats – and
indeed trans bovines.
265 Huxtable and Spratley, “Play with Truth.”
54
CONCLUSION: TRANS BOVINE POLITICS
All of my hybrid animal actors have now entered the circus stage – the artful and
satirical cow-woman, the decontextualized and dehumanized lolcow, and the techno-
virtual transitory therian. Together, these figures make up my proposed figure of the
trans bovine. With this figuration I wish to assert often overlooked qualities of the
real-life actors animating my trans bovine figure. Building upon Eliza Steinbock et
al.’s understanding of trans within their trans/animal/animacy synthesis of
tranimacies, my figure of the trans bovine refers to beings: in transition, in
(open-)bodily metamorphoses, who relate to their bodies through synthetic
hormones and/or the absence of physical remedies to body/identity rifts, who are in
conflict with Human, who resist and transgress clearly defined categories, who
operate on the fringes of a taxon, who are on display/exhibit, who have come under
a classificatory gaze, and who have a disputed stake in the visual politics of
embodiment.266 Though my hybrid actors most closely embody what I wish to
communicate with this figuration, the casting as trans bovine can be extended to any
groups and individuals who, in their desire to become with nonhuman Others, have
found themselves involuntarily placed within normative cringe economies.
With my three figures so far neatly mapped out, each onto one chapter and one
research sub-question, I will now have my figures speak out of turn and overlap to
answer my main research question:
What is the current position and possible contribution of cringe
transspecies/transgender actors within broader trans discourse and theory,
considering their frictions with transnormativity and their status as targets of ridicule
and harassment?
Sub-question #3: Trans bovines, trans figures?
Through the figure of the trans bovine, I have asked whether the simple act of
existing as a transspecies actor, with little or no knowledge of transspecies literature,
allows for meaningful contribution to the theory and discourse within this field. To this
end I have deployed Donna Haraway’s figure of the cyborg, to explore how groups
such as therians/furries might be seen as breaching the human/animal dichotomy.
What became further apparent in my research, was how furries/therians, in reaching
toward their ontologies and identities, incorporate methods by which further cyborg
dichotomies – between animal/machine, and between physical/virtual – are also
called into question. I have argued that especially the open-bodiedness of therians
may help confound anthropocentric projects through therian self-affirmation as
266 Here I am improvising a variation upon an inspiring quote which I cited verbatim earlier in this
thesis: “[…] experiences and practices that include beings in transition, bodily metamorphoses,
relating to your body through substances like hormones, resistance to and transgression of clearly
defined categories, falling out of a taxon, being folded into the bio-medical-industrial complex, being
on display/exhibit, coming under a classificatory gaze, and having a stake in visual politics of
embodiment.” (Steinbock, Szczygielska and Wagner, “Introduction: Thinking Linking.”)
55
nonhuman, while also serving as a clear expression of a virtual-techno embodiment
of a trans identity that crosses the species divide.
Yet, by no means do I wish to position therians’ open-bodiedness somewhere at the
apex of effective trans practices, and in that process, in the words of Jay Prosser,
“discard transgender in looking for the next transgressive thing.” 267 Such is the trap
we might fall into when we measure the worth of a mode of existence for the politics
of any agenda – be that agenda transphobic, transnormative, feminist, or post-
modern. Although my rejection of the perception of trans bovines as merely frivolous
creatures does, to some degree, stem from their potential to meaningfully add to
trans and transspecies dialogues, the trans bovine is not merely a hypothetical
synthesis of trans and animal. It is modeled after very real attempts by human
animals to become (with) nonhuman animals. For Haraway, the task ahead is not
some endless, gratuitous breaching of “the dichotomies between mind and body,
animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture,
men and women, primitive and civilized [which are already] all in question
ideologically,” 268 but rather to grapple with how this complexification of the world is
implicated in new and continued means of domination.269
Sub-question #1: Trans(species) subjugation?
This grappling with sites of subjugation shared between transspecies and
transgender actors, as per my first research question, is precisely what is on display
in the world of the cow-woman in Juliana Huxtable’s “Interfertility Industrial Complex”
– as a surreal caricature of present-day intersectional efforts, showing just how this
subjugation might take place. The fictitious intersectional feminists it portrays deny
any connection to the cow-woman and her transspecies nature, while the cow-
woman, in turn, vigorously disavows any connection to transgender people. What is
so fantastical about the world of the cow-woman is that precisely the impossibility of
physically becoming cow has been overcome, allowing the cow-woman to convert
her identification from an open-bodied dream to a much more readily visible kind of
bodied-ness in her surgical “journey to quadruped.” 270 In a utopian vision we might
expect this to result in a closer kinship between transgender and transspecies
actors. The parodic effect, which the impossibility of transspecies actors to
meaningfully pass as a nonhuman species was feared to have on vulnerable
transgender women, has been neutered, and there should be no more need for a
scapegoat. Yet the gutter-press headline still reads: “GENETICALLY MODIFIED
‘COW WOMAN’ ATTACKS TRANS ACTIVISTS: ‘I MAY BE PART COW, BUT I AM A
BIOLOGICAL FEMALE!’ ” 271
267 Prosser, Second Skins, p.203.
268 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” p.163.
269 Ibid., p.163.
270 Huxtable, untitled Instagram publicity post.
271 Huxtable and Spauldings, Interfertility Industrial Complex.
56
I have incorporated the cow-woman as a critical node in my figuration of the trans
bovine. Yet, she refuses to co-operate with my attempt to read her and her sibling
bovines – lolcows, and particularly therians – as standing in the tradition of Sojourner
Truth. I have argued that even as the question Ain’t I Animal? problematically inverts
the substance of Truth’s claim, it nonetheless holds within it the possibility for a
critical interrogation of the dichotomy between human and animal. Yet, paradoxically,
even as the cow-woman’s claim I MAY BE PART COW, BUT I AM A BIOLOGICAL
FEMALE! reaffirms Sojourner Truth’s own claim of womanhood, and even points to
the cow-woman’s differences from conventional womanhood – as most women are
not human-cow hybrids – she nonetheless completely upends the logic of Truth’s
question. One marker that clues us in to this departure is the cow-woman’s choice of
an exclamation mark over a question mark at the end of her claim. Here she stands
in stark contrast to the cow-woman’s therian sisters, for whom the claim to transness
is by no means a given; it is a soft, hopefully muttered thing; their question Ain’t I
(like) trans? posed not only to the audience, but to the members of the subculture
itself. Both bell hooks272 and Laverne Cox273 have argued for a rephrasing of Truth’s
question without the question mark, in the formulation Ain’t I a woman. Such a
declarative phrasing, Katrine Smiet argues, would strengthen the rhetorical
dimension of the claim, thus bolstering the critical affirmation that it may be able to
achieve.274 However, Smiet also contends that this declarative formulation may
inadvertently undercut the interrogative aspects of Truth’s statement.275 Much more
discordant, however, in my attempt of a read of trans bovines as feminist figures, is
the cow-woman’s total foreclosure of “non-biological females” from the category of
woman; or rather, the foreclosure of a femaleness which does not adhere to the cow-
woman’s specific read of what constitutes a biological woman. Whereas the
transgender body confounds biological sex as being a purely chromosomal matter,
and so does not outright concede to a sex/gender dichotomy (wherein the former
relates to biology and the latter to identity), the cow-woman, in her exclusion of
transgender women, smothers such involved reads of trans biology – as well as any
alliances which would have been possible through critical yet affirmative claims of
the assumed biological grounds of womanhood. Though alliances between various
expressions of surgically affirmed trans creatures might seem obvious, mere public
visibility of these bodies guarantees nothing but that visibility. Even more damning,
Huxtable argues that “the policing and the violence against trans people have a
direct relationship to that increase in visibility. The people who gain visibility – those
whom the media deem to be relatively ‘passable’ in one sense or another – end up
being used as examples to police trans people generally.” 276 Thus, as Lillian Wolf
272 Smiet, Sojourner Truth and Intersectionality, p.4.
273 Bell hooks and Laverne Cox, “A Conversation with Laverne Cox,” in: Appalachian Heritage, Vol.
43, No. 4, Fall 2015, pp. 24-40.
274 Smiet, Sojourner Truth and Intersectionality, pp.72-75.
275 Ibid., pp.72-75.
276 Che Gossett and Juliana Huxtable, “Existing in the World: Blackness at the Edge of Trans
Visibility,” in: Trap Door, eds. Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley and Johanna Burton, MIT Press, 2017,
p.42.
57
clearly saw, even though figures such as the cow-woman have the capacity to
engage each other in new relations, these new relations are as likely to reproduce
reified humanist discourses as they are to displace them. And so, beyond their mere
existence, it is in their specific trans methodologies, and in their grappling with cringe
economies, that trans bovines contribute to trans thinking.
Sub-question #2: Lolcows, unfairly maligned?
The issue that remains, as per my second sub-question, is whether certain
marginalized actors are justified in refusing to associate themselves with cringe
actors. And so, through my figure of the lolcow, I have asked whether or not trans
bovines have been unfairly maligned in their possible tensions with transgender
people, based on their status as cringe actors which would fuel anti-trans rhetoric.
Through an exploration of harassment forums, I have shown how the experience of
cringe toward especially non-passing, trans-adjacent people may appear as an
emotional guideline motivating a politics which privileges internal cohesion and the
physical safety of trans women as a vulnerable category, at the unfortunate but
acceptable expense of reducing other trans and trans-adjacent people to lolcows.
However, building upon sociological studies of harassment in online forums, as well
as Katherine Anne Schell’s affect-based analysis of cringe, I have questioned
whether accusations against non-passing trans and transspecies people can indeed
claim to be primarily motivated by a genuine concern for the well-being of
transgender people. I have argued that we might instead see these accusations as
transnormative moral justifications which serve to cognitively reconcile internalized
biases, obfuscate how these accusations serve to solidify one’s own position in a
community, and further add to ongoing narratives of mainstream transphobic
discourse.
Once these transspecies figures have been reduced to lolcows, any exploration of
the possibilities of trans desires becomes severely limited. In Huxtable’s “interfertility
industrial complex,” all the beautiful complexities of the cow-woman’s engagements
with cattle and cattle farming are reduced to nothing once in public vision. She
becomes subordinate to what Haraway names “control strategies […] formulated in
terms of rates, costs of constraints, degrees of freedom.” 277 Systems in which “the
privileged pathology affecting all kinds of components in this universe is stress –
communications breakdown.” 278 And so the cow-woman’s viability for inclusion into
queer feminist politics comes to be measured primarily through her ability to
exchange, talk, and trade with the visibility politics of pre-existing, recognized modes
of marginality – and without placing any undue stress on existing narratives. In our
own world, wherever trans bovines are reduced to the contemptuous cringe they
produce, they find themselves simultaneously troubling and fueling transnormative
and homonormative rhetoric. Persisting in the face of “bad press” accusations, the
277 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” p.163.
278 Ibid., p.163.
58
trans bovine finds itself as a nexus point around which discussions about actors
other than itself take place. Trans bovines are those who readily accept closeness to
that from which distance is sought, and, in their crossings, are always at risk of
themselves becoming the laughing stock, becoming the lolcow.
Furry tranimacies in cringe economies
As a tentatively final answer to my main research question: cringe
transspecies/transgender individuals – here in the guise of my figure of the trans
bovine – indeed do fulfil the dual role required by the methodology of feminist
figuration: providing bold new possible ways of being, speaking about, and thinking
trans; while also allowing us to interrogate reified normative trans feminist discourses
through which trans bovines are marked first as frivolous and cringe, and
subsequently as fungible. If there is one politics to be derived from my farm-
menagerie thus situated within feminist discourses, then this is a politics of question
marks!!! These will not be questions of categorical sorting into this or that queer
category, but of which queer figurations and discourses the bovines may interface
with. They will be questions of how and where these encounters may take place, and
of what the privileged forms of communication will be. Of whether it will be a
televised or a private affair. It will ask of these queer feminist discourses whether
they interpret the signs broadcasted by trans bovines as problematic, as sources of
stress for ongoing narratives. Whether they see in trans bovines a simultaneous
rhetorical challenge and opportunity, or whether trans bovines and feminist
discourses alike are ready to fit together into improvised and hopeful new couplings.
How individual instances of the trans bovine figure will perform in these
communications is never a given. Yet, a trans bovine politics which seeks to include
the entirety of its cross-species figure must hold within it a critique of the
domineering logic of contemptuous cringe, even when the transspecies crossings
and encounters of its ilk lack immediate political efficacy. It must critically affirm that it
is of the same bovine stock that renders its kin laughable. Trans bovines are all
those who pursue transspecies modes of existence, both frivolous and profound –
profoundly frivolous, and frivolously profound.
59
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