On Becoming Halimede. (Part 4)
i may be sisyphus. but she, my trans, is my rock - a kind other than brick, as i have been recently informed is unintentionally rude of me to say.
“Is it because I’m not a trans woman?” I ask my wife, somewhat petulant, peeling out of the theater parking lot in an attempt to beat the post-Nosferatu crowd. It’s gotten dark out. “Is it because I’m white? I’ve been trying to hash out a theory of why I don’t get canceled for saying the things trans women say.”
That’s been a project of a few years. It feels more urgent lately.
Her knee-jerk response - “It’s because you don’t have enough followers.” But in the silence that follows, as we both deliberate, she adds, “I’m not sure that’s it. I think you don’t go far enough. For example, you reject some of my post ideas out of hand, because you’re acutely conscious of how white and blonde you are. You think too much. You grind off the edges.”
“I’m glad you’re seeing something in that,” I say. “It’s really frustrating. Your white transfem friends get canceled all the time, though.”
“Only when they post,” she says, and laughs a soft, private laugh to herself.
“Also, I post all kinds of things that are controversial. I had a whole bit with real Halimede a while back about how I’d successfully, like, crybullied you out of asking to get pegged.”
A more pronounced laugh. “I remember that one.”
“Literally two nights ago I posted a whole thing with the “it”-in-quotes-as-penis bit. People liked that.”
“Right, right. No, I think you need to post more about cock.”
“I post the same amount real Halimede posts about cock!”
“At every phase of her development?”
I stop at a red light on Washington and mull this over. “Okay. Fair point.”
“And you need to racialize it. You’re not racializing me enough. You’ve got a weak point, in the sense that you’re too self aware to make Halimede level posts about, like, Japan. But you can make posts about Mexico,” she suggests, and reminds me when the light turns green, as I am too busy groaning in protest to really notice.
“I can’t do that,” I say.
“Oh, you can’t do something?” she retorts. “Then you have your answer, güerita. I don’t think you have the poster’s temperament, to be honest.”
“What? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“This has always been your art project. But you take it really personally. I think that’s what I meant by ‘firing from the hip’, when I recommended you stop doing that. The more of you that you put into it, the more you erode the boundary between yourself and your art, the harder it gets to tell a story that isn’t true to your sense of what you authentically are. It doesn’t make you post badly, just makes you pull punches, because you would pull them.”
“Ugh.” I verbalize the groan this time. We stop at a pizza shop, where, fortunately, there is an empty space in the small lot. I’ve been getting better at driving since my wife moved here, by sheer abundance of practice. I park immaculately.
This is one of the restaurants we went to after our wedding in last January. We’ve been doing a whole anniversary-fortnight thing, to celebrate her legally entering the country, then legal marriage, then the ceremony itself. It would feel even better if USCIS didn’t abruptly delay her permanent residency decision by nearly a year in the aftermath of the presidential election in November. I am considering hiring another lawyer; I did this round of paperwork myself, but I’m not especially confident about the hopefully unnecessary lawsuit maybe-looming.
It’s been a weird year. She can’t legally work, and can’t legally drive in this state, without permanent residency. We’ve spent a lot of time on the phone with health insurance companies. But I remind myself that this time last year, the question was ‘hormone acquisition’, with real urgency. We’re not treading water so much as we think. I have two jobs. We can afford a lawyer if we need one.
“That’s one of the smartest things about what real Halimede is doing,” I say, holding the door for her; chromey red bells jingle as it opens. “She’s writing a story. Or - she’s Meryl Streep, you know? Just completely disappearing. It’s more art than pure polemic, because she doesn’t exist in it.”
“I don’t mean to imply anything reductive about authorial identity and art,” my wife continues. “But you’re also not a trans woman.”
“What could be reductive about that? What’s there even to imply? I’m portraying a cis woman. I guess I’m not that either.”
“You’re portraying a trans woman playing a cis woman,” she says, matter-of-fact. “It’s different. I can’t put my finger on it.”
“No, that makes sense,” I say.
“I still think she’s Max Schwartz.”
“I know you do,” I say. “I love you very much, for your convictions and many other reasons.”
We order slices, pick up a water bottle for her and a limoncello cake for me, and sit. She begins to chew on the bottle cap.
“I think you’re plural,” she says, around her mouthful of plastic.
“Nope,” I say.
“You’ve become more of a princess since you started Halimeding.”
“I’m not a princess. It’s an exercise in empathy,” I say, putting my elbows on the high-top table, thinking about pizza.
The slices here are so thin, they practically disintegrate under the weight of their own toppings. I used to think the reason I couldn’t run for President of the United States was because someone would find a picture of me from this very restaurant, eating my pepperoni-and-mushroom with a fork and a knife, so great is my distaste for getting grease on my hands.
“Maybe the empathy is the problem. You think about the way she deserves to be received a lot for someone who wants to be canceled. Your goals are contradicting each other.”
“Okay, you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall,” I tell her, though I don’t think she’s as wrong as my tone probably implies.
My wife shrugs and opens her Letterboxd. “I’m going to write my Nosferatu review.”
I get our pizza from the counter. It instantly forms a sort of pizza-paper-plate complex with the thin later of cardboard beneath it. This is the best pizza in the world, as far as I’m concerned. The pizzeria is out of plastic forks; I make do with a spoon and knife as she taps at her phone and comments appreciatively on the food.
All of my writing is an exercise in empathy. Halimede is not like me, more so than my usual leading-lady, but not by an order of magnitude. I write about women who have something wrong with them because if I don’t, I’ll die. This project has been helpful because eighty-hour work weeks don’t leave a lot of time for longform prose, which requires rumination and a kind of long-term thinking that’s pretty much burned out of me after stumbling out of the emergency department at four in the morning. Microfiction is life-sustaining, a Cardene drip when I don’t have the bandwidth for a bolus.
It’s been strange, after years of original fiction, to return to the guardrails of someone else’s story. The topic of the uncancelable Halimede has been on my mind, despite exactly zero vitriol directed towards yours truly, because my foray into her sphere has coincided with a kind of bizarre campaign against her.
The accusations are these:
Halimede is a chaser, which is unequivocally bad, and must be vocally condemned by all members of the Trans Community, for reasons of ethical purity. (see a certain genre of tweets to this effect - ‘if you think Halimede is funny, unfollow me immediately’)
Halimede is creating the mechanism of the oppression of trans women on Twitter. (less a genre of tweet than a specific tweet, many-times-liked)
Halimede poses basically the same potential hazard to trans women on Twitter that ‘’real chasers’’ pose, and thus must be flushed out like a fox from her burrow to face judgment. (why did it have to be hot lady appreciator who was messaging minors and not Halimede?) (how did she wriggle out of accountability for her crimes yet again?)
Halimede is annoying to me personally. (i don’t think she’s evil, but i will take this cultural moment to contribute that i find her artistically inept by my standards, which does not constitute ‘piling on’, it’s a different thing when i do it.)
And the replies, by her supporters, tend to take a few distinct tacks, applied by scattershot in opposition to all of these criticisms.
The most frequent: Halimede is a trans woman doing a bit.
Critics of the ‘1’ school of criticism respond to this by merely lumping in this imagined trans woman as yet another misguided victim or malicious proponent of ‘chaser culture’. It’s pretty profoundly naive to think that ‘being a trans woman’ would protect any woman from being treated as a sexually threatening predator or source of corruption, which is also why this does nothing to address ‘3’. Similarly, critic ‘2’ simply notes that oppression is also bad when perpetuated by the group at hand.
Critic ‘4’, of course, does not need to defend their claim at all. Trans women are certainly, as women, considered annoying and unfunny, particularly when popular and oversaturated.
The response that actually interacts with all of these claims, on the other hand, is that @HalimedeMF is microfictional endurance artwork. It was my wife who first brought up Rhythm 0 to me, in dialogue with my commedia dell’arte interpretation of the foundational narrative. Her audience are not just the zanni onstage with her, either completing the gag or flailingly acceding to it; as Frazer Ward describes Rhythm 0 in No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience, “in the smaller, less formal setting of the gallery, and with a less precise invitation to shape their response, the audience ultimately factionalized, with one group defending Abramović against another, when, we are given to believe, a loaded gun was being worked into her hand.” (20)
For the unfamiliar, “Abramović arranged an array of things on a table in a gallery in Naples and then identified herself as an object along with them. Do with me what you will, she said.” (20) Abramović’s only ‘aggressive’ act, Ward notes, was passivity, leaving the audience with the burden of agency, and the twin burden of accountability for the escalation that occurred: sexual violence and more traditional violence, wounding, stripping, threats of death.
Some members of the audience defended her. Others put a gun in her hand, pressed it to her temple, forced her finger to the trigger.
Halimede certainly provokes more than Abramović. She does not leave all the responsibility in the hands of the audience, or my instantiation of her would be treated in all ways the same. What I notice is that I hesitate, even with a reply I know is pithy, funny, character-definitive, and most importantly, ‘correct’ for her to say - @HalimedeMF doesn’t seem to.
It leaves us with a question not unlike that Abramović posed to the audience: a dilemma of community as much as agency.
Can the ‘trans community’ resist a compelling interloper, and should it?
Can the ‘trans community’ resist the impulse to cancel, threaten death, to wish and enact sexual violation against an oft-assumed trans woman of lower status than them?
Does it matter whether or not she is trans, if being assumed trans does not protect her, and denying transgenderedness doesn’t protect her either?
Is there a force at work other than Serano’s trans-misogyny - is the cruelty and willful misrepresentation, the audience-escalation in violence against @HalimedeMF, a baring of some broader hatred of the generalized-female object still present beneath the surface even in ‘communities’ of trans lesbians who have faced the same violence dozens of times over, seemingly learning nothing but how to refine it to an art when a lesser woman presents herself as target?
What makes a trans woman low-status enough to harm? A ‘small account’ is protected by that ephemeral law against ‘punching down’, though that, not exceptionally much. But she is also protected by obscurity. What vulnerates a trans woman, or any woman, what makes her a worthy target, is her exposure. Hence the roughly monthly debate about whether transfem ‘overrepresentation’ is a privilege or a mark of Cain.
To go a step further, my wife would tell you that the trans community these women are attempting to protect doesn’t exist. Like any trans woman, she’s been accused out of spaces she felt kinship in on thin pretexts - ‘liking Homestuck, which is bad’, ‘an ugly breakup over Discord’, survival sex alone as a teenager in the United States, a thousand miles and a militarized border from home on a plane ticket she couldn’t afford to change, fortunate enough to have someone to offer herself to for somewhere warm to stay until the return flight after being kicked out by the woman who invited her there. I’m conscious of these things because she is.
A question to which @HalimedeMF demands an answer is, “do you know how to protect a woman you believe to be one of your own from your greater community’s attempt to isolate and punish her for artwork?” - and she has an answer, furnished every few weeks by the factions separating to depose and defend her. No one in the trans community knows how to keep even one deeply popular artist ‘safe’.
I like to think that if I had been present at Rhythm 0, I would have been there participating in art and anticipating the worst. I like to think it would have been different if I was there. I like to think I wouldn’t have turned on my wife, any of those times; that I would have protected her when she clearly needed it, that I wouldn’t have piled on with, well, ‘I’m not surprised she cheated on you when you had a totally normal mental breakdown due to your mental illness, that she really should’ve expected, knowing you well enough to be dating - I always thought she was kind of annoying myself.’ I like to think that you wouldn’t have, either.
But communities of allies and of trans women alike are due for a reckoning, not because @HalimedeMF keeps getting canceled, but because, in 2025, people in these spaces are still every bit as bared, vulnerable, and precarious as they were in the height of the Google Doc Callout in 2017. In The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars, Todd Gitlin wrote presciently in 1995 - “If there is no people, only peoples, there is no left.”
@HalimedeMF is the chaser, and the comic, and the artist, that the identitarian left deserves: a liberal.
My wife looks up from her first piece of pizza, mostly-gone. “You know, I hadn’t really thought of that as sex work in a while.”
“Do you want me to take it out?”
“No, it makes the point. And I told you to be more direct.” She muses at the crust, then eats that, too.
“I don’t know if I’m making this point well enough. It’s been gestating for a while, since your whole series of posts -” which she also did not get canceled for “- about how the trans community doesn’t exist. I don’t know. It was bothering me, the notion of protecting something pure and innocent and completely fake from the incursion of the same art piece that’s exposing its fakeness in dialogue.”
She nods, still lost in thought, returning to her ruminant bottlecap. “It all boils back down to transmisogyny. The woman who’s performing is the fake one, the sexual transgressive and aggressor who can be safely pilloried as a threat to polite society. Trans women become the woman walking with the man who notices ‘all the shit he’s wearing’, and agree. They get to be the female-er acquaintance that licenses the remarks as acceptable, deployed against the lesser, baser, faker woman. It’s assimilation, but it’s only possible because trans women are women.”
“The women of women,” I say gravely, and she laughs. “Do you think I could get canceled for this essay?”
“Why do you want to be canceled so badly?” she sighs. “You’d hate being canceled.”
“Gender affirmation,” I reply, and she spits out the much-chewed bottlecap rather than aspirate it, laughing.
She looks down, fiddles with her phone, and submits her Letterboxed review of Nosferatu. 4.5 out of 5 stars. Then she curses aloud.
“Fuck. I could’ve added ‘release the PIV cut’. Fuck!”
