On skin

Western architecture is rooted in an epistemology of boundaries and demarcation, of enclosure and stability.

Trans bodies such as my own – in which bodily, social, and spatial rupture are inevitable – performatively

enact a necessary critique of this epistemology.

    When I was 20 years old and an undergraduate architecture major at Yale, I lived in an apartment on the 

corner of Dwight and Elm that had been converted from an attic. Given this initially unplanned use of the

space directly under the house’s hipped roof, the ceiling in the living room and bathroom that I shared with

my roommate sloped steeply, meeting the outer wall only about three feet off the floor (as far as memory

serves). In that living room, my roommate and I once duct-taped an aqua blue bedsheet to a low part of the

ceiling so that it hung vertically. It became the improvised backdrop for the above self-portrait, part of a

project for Joel Sanders’ seminar on “the politics of display.” On my back, you see subtle, but distinctly

present, impressions where a chest binder, a notoriously constrictive garment, dug into the surface of my

skin. They are more visible in this image than the spatial adaptations that went into its creation, yet the two

are equally necessary to the portrait before you.

   Looking at this image in the present day, I notice how the impressions on my skin are echoed by the creased 

fabric background. An apt isomorphism: the binder’s marks on my skin were ultimately ephemeral, as

creases in fabric might be. Nonetheless, binders wore painfully on me, compressing, constraining, and

enclosing my body as though to redraw its boundaries to match bodily boundaries that are normatively

categorized as male, not female. I wore binders to morphologically undermine, even implode, the boundaries

of my body and thus of the category of female. In honor of this implosion, a tattoo now reads “Come apart at

the seams” where my chest had been surgically reconstructed (terminology shared, here, between

architecture and medicine).
Popular discourse often reductively portrays transition as revisionary, as a shift from occupying one

stable, legible set of embodied boundaries to occupying the opposite set—there is no “beyond” to this

“body” of discourse. But in my experience, for trans bodies, there is only the body beyond. There is only the

refusal to learn that the morphology of the body holds a priori meaning, only the unlearning of knowledge

based in objective categories, and only the relearning of what the body can be beyond those categories.