casablanca: draft draft draft

spectacles/casablanca.gmi

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+# notes on casablanca
+
+> Powers beyond my control had brought me to Room 5 at the clinic in Casablanca, and I could not have run away then even if I had wanted to…I went to say good-bye to myself in the mirror.
+
+> You think I don't understand? The hopeless dream of being. Not seeming to be, but being. Conscious and awake at every moment. At the same time, the chasm between what you are to others and what you are to yourself. The feeling of vertigo, and the constant hunger to be unmasked once and for all.
+
+> at 12 years old, i decided to be beautiful.
+
+when i get my pussy, i plan to tell everyone i'm “going to Casablanca”.
+
+/ liminal spaces
+// in betweens - purgatories
+//
+
+## wrong bodies
+
+> I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.
+
+> To expunge those superfluities, like the Phrygians of old, to scour myself of that mistake, to start again, to recapture some of that white freshnees I used to feel, singing the psalms at Oxford! To alter the body! to match my sex to my gender at last, and make a whole of me!
+
+> Please God, make me a girl.
+
+/ something about the divine feminine? what's the lede to this
+
+for Morris, it's not merely that womanhood is divine. to be sure, she identifies “femaleness” as sacramental, fragile—it's a “virginal ideal”, eternal, leading us above. but it's also that gender itself exists in the realm of divinity. this is a metaphysical commitment; that, in fact, gender both preceeds and is above the body. here, C.S. Lewis is called into service: “Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex…Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless.” Morris even presents her mundane experiences of self realization as taking place in spiritual settings: among the pews at Oxford, under the piano, above the sea.
+
+in Harry Benjamin's office it gives her claim to the status of “true transsexual”, which she's at pains throughout the narrative to distinguish from other kinds of gender nonconformity (mostly following the model of Benjamin's Sex Orientation Scale). when she changes her body, the techniques may be mystical, ancient, oriental (even as they are modern and scientific), but their purpose is to remove a flaw from the material world, bringing it in line with higher truth.
+
+it's not clear how much Morris' recitation of this teleology is cynical—Harry Benjamin Syndrome looms large over Wrong Body narratives everywhere, but Morris seems earnest. what's undeniable is that she needs this Christian dualism because it allows her to pursue transition without compromising her class position.
+
+## saying goodbye to ourselves
+
+/ metempsychosis (joyce??)
+/ flights of angels
+// sex changes bringing us closer to God.
+
+## life oozes in from all sides
+
+/ a turn to the body
+/ intersubjectivity
+/ political visions
+
+
+---
+
+=> https://sandystone.com/empire-strikes-back.pdf The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto, Sandy Stone
+=> https://philpapers.org/archive/BETTIT.pdf Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression
+and Resistance, Talia Mae Bettcher