OPEN TRANS FORMS All My Friends Are Trans (or Will Be Soon) MARQUIS BEY Abstract This essay makes the case that the author’s friends, all of them, are or are becoming trans. Not in a way that indexes a medico-juridical demographic, but in the sense that trans as a mode of living is the grounds on which the author forges relationality. Thus it is no surprise that time and again, friends the author has long had keep consistently shifting their identifications, moving more radically in unrelation to gender, becoming, in a word, trans. Keywords trans, friends, Gilles Deleuze, abolition I f you ask some folks of a certain generation, or some folks of a certain political leaning, or even some folks who are otherwise fine people and just don’t “get it,” you’ll hear pangs of All this gender stuff has just gone too far. Or Apparently, you can just say you’re a woman and now I’m the bad guy if I don’t think of you that way. You might even hear inflections of the aforementioned within the very field for which this journal is a commemoration, something to the effect of “Nowadays, all you have to do is say you’re trans and, viola!, you’re trans. And if anyone can be trans, what’s the point?” Or something like that. And I’m here loving every second of the things to which these are all responding. Though I am one who often, much to others’ frustration, immediately takes the route of the philosophical, I’ll suspend such theoretical maneuvers for a brief moment. Instead, I begin with the interpersonal, the experiential, not to venerate these things or imply their hierarchized fundamentality relative to the philosophical but to assuage my potential detractors—indeed, I am also one who, departing from many of my comrades, wishes to de-emphasize the expe- riential and material, as my understanding of trans quite deeply exceeds and vitiates the grounds on which the material and experiential, and the implicit transparency of both, rest. Believe it or not, there are quite a few who do not wish for this kind of trans to resonate. But that is, to me, the future of trans— and, too, its present, its past. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 10, Numbers 3–4 * November 2023 208 DOI 10.1215/23289252-10900732 ª 2023 Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/10/3-4/208/2063782/208bey.pdf?guestAccessKey=885fca93-2622-4e7b-8bf0-da36bdec029a by guest on 19 March 2024