a ketamine trip through the trans girl suicide museum
“My pronouns are she/her/suicidality”
A title like trans girl suicide museum is its own trigger warning. That it fronts a ketamine journal / meme starter pack about transitioning signals hannah baer’s brand of dark humor and her taste for glib, self-aware provocation.
The metaphorical “trans girl suicide museum” places baer’s transition against a gruesome history of violence toward trans women. This includes all those pushed to die by suicide. The image of a suicide museum concatenated with the darker side of my own experiences of body dysphoria, as well as encounters with both internalized and external transphobia: a precarious experience of gender that can feel adjacent to death. I remember the first time I wore a skirt in public—on the bus to a club—I kept imagining a coroner’s exhibit of my own body, splayed in blood. As alive as I felt, I also felt face to face with the proximity of my potential death; this split continues to visit me in the form of recurring dissociative episodes.
Living inside a museum’s necropolis is a rich metaphor. The way a body can feel like a museum. “Gender flickers, hiccups, and spins. It creeps and it slithers, it infects and it disappears. Not being trapped in a body, being trapped in a museum.” This metaphor made me reconsider the trans visibility trap in light of the history of museums as sites of collection, colonization, and surveillance. Even, or maybe especially, in a post-“Transgender Tipping Point” moment, our gender-variant bodies are often hypervisible and objectified in public, evoking horror, repulsion, fascination and fetishization, and medical and state surveillance. Microaggressions, from an extra pat down at airport security to being the only person in a room asked for your pronouns, not only cause searing humiliation, but also remind us that the glass walls of the suicide museum look both ways.
hannah baer, our psychopomp through the suicide museum, is a self-described “ketamine princess,” a “party girl” intent on “reclaiming ‘bimbo.’” The book constitutes a spiraling grand tour of baer’s inner thoughts, often while high, from the midst of her early transition. “Instead of writing think pieces, people should just write about how they are feeling, that would be more helpful.” Okay, so if not a think piece, maybe this is a feel piece: writing as a mode of processing the edges of gender, naming raw feelings even if the language is a reach. Towards this end, baer embraces a messy aesthetic. She has a flair for provocative hot takes (“ketamine made me more trans”) and preserves typos. She bookends chapters with memes from her popular Instagram meme account. I felt like I was scrolling through a Tumblr blog, an effect which I perhaps felt doubly while consuming my review copy in .pdf form.
Messiness is a compelling formal solution to address the challenge of writing an unfolding trans narrative in “real time,” against the mainstream grain of a singular narrative of transness as a medical transition out of a “wrong” body to one’s “true” gender on the opposite end of a binary pole. The truth is messier, and the messiness of baer’s book conveys that. trans girl suicide museum tracks changes across a two-year period as drafts of an ongoing process of becoming. The challenge of writing is trying to keep up with those changes. “I get on the phone with Cyrus, and we talk about our writing projects, about hating what we’re saying about trans experience because it’s all changing so fast.”
Grasping for a foothold, baer turns to illicit substances to help her process her transness. “OK OK i just did a bunch more K to try and tell you about this.” Doing another bump, she tries to explain what feels particularly trans about ketamine. “Sometimes trans people’s gender presentations or experiences can have these different dissonant parts in them and k gives me the liberated compartmentalized eye to just see the ones they want me to see.” When baer writes on ketamine, her drug logic — the force of its hyper-symbolic connections, its vivid imagery, and its affinity for associative tangents and conjectures — lends the text liveness and texture.
I was mesmerized by passages that made a concrete case for the lifeworld of nightlife for trans people. How its drug-laced adventures are not merely escapist but as substantial to her and her friends as, say, marriage:
In my grad school class, as an introduction, we’re asked to say what the most important thing we’ve done in our lives. Everyone in the class, literally everyone, all twelve people, say that getting married was the most important thing. I want to say getting out of bed this morning. I want to say doing k with Hazel at a club in Queens last weekend when we locked ourselves in the single user bathroom and peered at each other through either side of the legs of a chair that was in the corner, curled up on the floor, each of us, saying how much our friendship was a monument, how we helped each other survive, blowing ketamine off of her cellphone and texting Rovena and telling her to come to the club.
You get a real sense of trans femme connection that clubs foster. At its best, trans girl suicide museum feels like you’re chatting with a friend at a party. I related to baer’s social analysis of queer nightlife as a site of ego death and life-affirming friendship:
“My therapist asks me why I’m addicted to drugs and partying. I want to just say that they’re suicide adjacent, that when I’m really high and deep in the music, I almost don’t exist. Instead I tell him that boundaries go away so fast in those spaces, that you get to be really connected right away.”
Reading from amidst the heightened boundaries of quarantine, I missed and yearned for the haptic intimacy of queer clubbing.
Granted, there is a lot of privilege in being able to get away with writing about drugs, let alone in affording ketamine in the first place; I can’t recall any moment in the book mentioning work. Unlike most rich white people I know, baer is upfront about addressing her privilege, and doesn’t shy away from discussing her internalized guilt. While writing about race from whiteness or class from wealth often erases these identity markers to claim a false “universal” subjectivity, baer’s takes pains to acknowledge that she is “a trans girl who doesn’t really experience the disempowerment of class oppression &/or racial oppression — and therein the specific ways that transphobia, transmisogyny, racism, and class oppression intersect. In that way this text is about richness and whiteness in addition to whatever else it’s about. If for whatever reason you don’t have an appetite for another artifact of wealthy white subjectivity, feel free to put this book down.” Far from deterring me, the tone and intent of this preface enticed me to read on.
Following through, baer interrogates her privilege and oppression with nuance. This comes to a head when she observes that while transitioning, she has shifted away from the organizing work she used to be more engaged with. She writes of her sense of shame that instead of attending protests or meetings, she’s spending the bulk of her time online shopping and partying. Staying stuck in the suicide museum, she fears, might be a luxury.
“I just felt so fucked up about transness and class and how completely cut off from my political or activist life I’ve been in the suicide museum, just going to no protests and no planning meetings and systematically neglecting any relationship with any one who would pull me back into activist work, because I have no constitution for it, no imagination for it, just imagination for myself, my clothes, my drugs, my friends, my fucked up gender, my surgeries and health insurance.”
Survival is enough of a task for any of us to focus on, but I understand feeling guilty for the choices that get us through.
At times I was bothered by the book’s rushed research. Though I recognize that the goal of the book was oriented towards journaling a personal experience, I wondered why the author or editor couldn’t be bothered with fact-checking when discussing academic topics. For example, when baer talks about attending Re-evaluation Counseling (RC), she explains to readers that the counseling process is rooted in physical discharge. “You can do it in five ways, by laughing, crying, shaking, yawning, and maybe yelling (-I think, I can’t remember exactly what all the rules are).” This parenthetical was a baffling moment which took me out of an otherwise engrossing account of the humiliation baer experienced getting kicked out of a trans-exclusionary peer-to-peer counseling group. Or the breezy references section, which at times feels second-hand. baer’s overly casual approach to citing sources made me less confident in my ability to trust what I was reading, and made me wonder about the the author’s privilege to be able to get away with such glossing.
This book’s strength point is conveying the importance of community for transgender exploration. The process of finding oneself as a trans person is best ridden not as a solo endeavor, but as a journey connecting with others nearby:
Your gender is not something you experience only in isolation, but something that is reflected back to you by other people, that gender is what leaks out in the eyes of cis people clocking us in public bathrooms or our family members making assumptions about us, and the ways the leakage bounces back and ricochets and echoes — in dressing rooms and the lines at nightclubs, and at airport security and in the line at Walgreens when you look like a girl and you’re buying condoms and enemas — and then also that is held up or shone upon us by other queer people, by our trans sisters and siblings, by other gender variant friends and familiars.
This is a neat turn back to the problem of the overwhelming violent gaze that feeds the suicide museum. On display here is a healing gaze of trans affirmation: a form of looking out for each other that allows us to feel seen.
Help is available. If you or someone you love are struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can call 1–800–273–8255 for 24/7 service to connect with a trained crisis counselor. Additionally, Trans Lifeline is a trans-led organization that offers a peer support hotline 1–877–565–8860.
