Right-intentioned as it is, you can tell that an over-enthusiastic cis dude wrote the gender stuff in the star beast. I don’t begrudge it, he’s trying, but in particular a trans person would not have written that “binary” business the way that Davies did. It feels… a bit much.
There’s a shade of this positive othering going on. An exoticizing of the trans experience, in effort to elevate it and say, “Actually aren’t the transes ever so magical and unconstrained compared to us? Isn’t it lovely when you think about it?”
I see what he’s doing, but—😅
It reminds me of how, in escaping overtly malevolent cultural stereotypes, other marginalized peoples are often cast as these mystical seers, portals to a hidden world or another level of consciousness, for the “normal” characters to consult and regard with deference.
I mean. Davies’ heart is in the right place, and this is clearly his attempt at positive propaganda (as he has stated he fully intends to produce), to counter the toxic cultural and political forces that are making him so righteously angry. I appreciate that. It’s important work.
Normalization, this ain’t quite, though.
Trans people are just people, yo. “Transness” is something imposed on us by a society that insists on controlling everyone’s lives and bodies. I’m just a girl, one who’s a little fucked-up from decades of being forced to pretend I wasn’t.
I am of course special and mystical and wonderful in other ways, but those are individual to azurelore. They’ve nothing to do with any circumstances outside of my control that led people to project a lifetime of nonsense onto me because of what my genitals happened to look like.
I am all about the positive propaganda, Russell. I’m here for whatever raging anarchist screeds you have in store. Glad to see the show weird and progressive and passionate and curious again.
Just, maybe consider letting a trans writer handle trans characters and themes for you?
Though all of NIN kind of exists on a different level from other pop music, one could make a life’s work of studying The Downward Spiral and never come to a point where it feels like one has run dry of revelations.
To my concern, I often comment on the distinct transiness of Reznor’s music. There are really obvious moments like “The Becoming,” but there’s just this tone and perspective to so much of the emotional journey. This is extremely 2019 for Azure, for instance:
I guess there’s a certain universality in the infamous vagueness of his lyrics. You can project anything into Trent’s little trauma boxes. But through all his work there’s this regular sense of transition, of fear of one’s identity, of numbness and desperation, of one’s false persona eating one alive.
“Help me understand myself,” his music pleads. “Nothing that anyone has told me seems to fit, or make sense to me. I don’t have the tools. But—don’t look too closely, because whatever’s in there, I just know it’s horrible, it’s irredeemable. It scares me. And if you see it, then I’ll have nothing. I’ll be helpless again, and then even hope will be tarnished.”
All that’s interspersed with these moments of just, fuck it: I have nothing left to lose. I’m going to go down this rabbit hole, guide or no guide. Lifeline or not. I don’t care anymore. God help me. Whatever I truly am, I might as well find it and face up to it, even if it kills me.
There’s just this constant sense of grief and loss and despair, and disgust and horror with one’s self—of searching for any kind of a frame that makes the pieces add up in a positive way, and finding nothing but pain in the models pushed onto you by every controlling force in your life.
Again it’s all so vague, which is why he’s a successful artist. All this sounds a heck of a lot like adolescence. You get this with a general sort of heartbreak. With disability or neurodivergence-related traumas. With any sort of existential anxiety that we all experience at one time or another; any time when our ideas of ourselves don’t match up with the story that we’re fed by the world that we live in.
But like. In practice and in totality, this is such a deep, distilled, rich kind of a trauma that Reznor depicts. And it’s so thoroughly infused with these questions of identity—of reaching the end of the usefulness of the self you were handed, and of embracing the part of you that has caused you too much distress to acknowledge. It’s all about metamorphosis, of casting off the last vestiges of a humanity that does not fit and just going with whatever horrors you’ve failed to keep inside all this time. Time after time he hammers on this inability to keep masking any longer, and the death of one’s connection to an abusive world.
Nothing can stop me now I don’t care anymore
There’s a fatalist spin here, and there’s a determined one. It’s kind of the same agency you get with body modification; that in a less healthy outlet may lead to, say, cutting behaviors (and, well, potential hesitation marks).
The Alice Glass song “Mine” angles at a similar kind of space:
Here I go again, it’s all I can do (Let go) So tonight I’ll take my own body I’ll take my own, take my own mind Abuse myself till I’m finally mine again Finally mine again I will go and use a ninety nine cent Razor drawn, razor drawn line Leave a trace till I’m finally mine again Finally mine again
It’s not a healthy trauma response, but it’s just—claiming some kind of autonomy. Over one’s body, one’s emotions, over one’s sense of self. Even if it’s a destructive one. If you’re going to survive after everything, you need to be your own person, set your own terms.
Azure ain’t the same person who looked after her body those forty-some years before she woke up. A lot of things happened last August, all at once—but the breasts are not an insignificant one. They quickly became an anchor for my identity: this permanent, physical, obvious affirmation of who and what I am, that no one can ever take away. They became this cornerstone of body autonomy, of this general sense of self-possession that I’ve never enjoyed before.
To that end, I’m going to get my ears pierced. Sooner than later. This summer, probably. I never understood the appeal before my tits came in. Tattoos, piercings, any kind of body modification, it just—my head, it was locked in this deferential mode. “My body doesn’t belong to me,” I felt. “I don’t belong to myself. I’m not a real person.” Like, it wasn’t my right to do anything with the body, the name, the identity, the character sheet I was given. I would get in trouble. I would ruin this thing that I was handed responsibility to maintain, for someone else’s benefit. For me to tamper with it would be this inexcusable critical failure.
But it turns out that I am a real person, with all the same rights, worthy of exactly the same consideration, as anyone else. No one gets to control my body but me, and I get to make choices on what to do with it. I get to assert that control as I see fit—including decoration. Including things that serve no function beyond making me feel good. Which is an important end on its own, as it turns out.
I’m fortunate to have (rather late in life) found the tools to understand myself and to work out what I need in a reasonably healthy way. I’ve still got all this business to do, to strip out all the wrong wires and set myself right. But I’m on the path now. I think I’m going to be okay. But to have this support, to be able to interpret what’s going on inside me independent of the judgment and expectation of the world that I’m living in—that’s not a given. And it took me four decades. And not everyone has the fortune to stumble on those resources.
Heck, that neglect is mostly by design. We’re not meant to find the tools that will help us, because then we’ll no longer be prey to the system that feeds off of us and depends on our unquestioning obedience to generate all of the wealth that we’ll never ourselves see in our lifetimes. We’re not meant to have that agency, none of us—which again speaks to the universality of the sentiment in Reznor’s music. But there are degrees and nuances, right? There are colors and shades. And existential horror is one of the biggest drivers here.
Nine Inch Nails is substantially about horror, specifically through the lens of what we are presented as pure and correct and acceptable, and that is impossible to ever actually live up to. Combine that with all the sexuality and the imagery around changing bodies, and, well. It’s fucking queer, right. It’s unavoidable. Not exclusively, and I expect not deliberately, but distinctly and clearly. The queer-coding is just about blinding, and once you’re in a place to notice, you’ll never ever unsee it. You’ll only ever find further confirmation.
And among all its other strengths, The Downward Spiral is such a centerpiece for this energy. It’s all throughout Reznor’s work. From track one there’s this association between the perceived wrongness of self with monstrosity, with evil, with internalized fear on the basis of what one is told. It’s like, my very essence is an offense to all that is pure. I am an abomination by virtue of these facts of me that I have no control over but I am assured are objectively, unavoidably dangerous. This is the kind of logic that fuels anti-trans bills, that fuels hate crimes and lets them off with “gay panic” or “trans panic” defenses. It’s all about fear and hatred and disgust for the intrinsic evil that lurks inside.
Then underlying that notion of casting off ties to other people’s notions of humanity and embracing the horrors within one’s self, after the catharsis there’s this constant theme of being ruined. It’s angled against a vague religious context, but more broadly against “reality”—like, the surface of the social framework one is handed. It’s this all-or-nothing thinking where taking one step away from some hypothetical light will tarnish a person forever on some fundamental level, and there is no getting that purity back. From that moment, one will never not be tainted.
That’s a damaging sort of narrative to buy into, in regard to anything. It informs stuff like the AA model to addiction therapy, to our criminal justice system, to sex, to any kind of exposure to “dangerous” ideas. It’s a social control device, that serves to tell people they are essentially bad and owe their lives to the system. It serves to demonize and scapegoat the vulnerable as symbols to other members of society rather to than actively provide the support they need to live healthy lives. And it’s what we do all the time, to basically everyone who steps over an ever-shifting imaginary line.
Again though for all its ubiquity, when you combine this dynamic with all the body horror and identity and sexual stuff, well—the overall impression is profoundly relatable to someone whose body and identity and ideas about sex are considered essentially “other,” and threatening and diseased, and horrifying and wrong.
I was never not afraid of public toilets—they’re gross and psychologically strange, and leave one feeling vulnerable in all these different ways at once—but as a transfeminine person, I’m sure as hell going to avoid them forever, to the extent I am able. I will plan around them.
Because of unavoidable elements of who and what I am, to some people I will never not be considered an existential threat. And they will use that as an excuse to hurt me, to take out all of their other unresolved traumas and resentments on a person whom they can tell themselves deserves it.
I’ve gone through most of my life knowing I was broken and disgusting and wrong, and I’m used to having that affirmed by anyone who has gotten close enough to see beyond the flimsy mask I had propped up to keep me safe from those who would call out a mob if they recognized me. I know now that this garbage doesn’t apply to me, and I know it’s all somebody else’s problem, but it still leaves me vulnerable in a lot of situations. The street harassment is bad enough, but what if I don’t brush them off before they clock that I’m transgender?
There is something about queerness that presents as a fundamental threat. Fundamentally devious. Conniving, perverse, manipulative. Decayed, revolting, evil. This narrative is so central to our experience, in relation to the world and the stories we’re told about ourselves. So for Reznor’s music explore this precise conflict, much to most of the time, it’s—it just really feels familiar, you know? Hauntingly so. This trauma isn’t a passing thing for me, just as it’s no incidental topic for Reznor. It’s not a bad year, or a bad event, or a stray misunderstanding. This is life. This is what it means to exist in the world I was handed.
I am so fortunate to now be in a place where I can love myself the way that I do. This is so miraculous to feel, and I appreciate it every single day. It was so hard to find my way here, and I’m never going to let go again. And that catharsis from Reznor’s music, over so many years, is part of how I made it here alive. Intentionally or (more likely) not, that deep and overwhelming queer coding, it helped to underline that this struggle could be in some way articulated. That it wasn’t just me who felt this way, even if I didn’t know where it was coming from. It helped to validate the pain I felt, even without any answers.
I really owe this music a lot for keeping me going, keeping me on some level sane enough, until I could find the resources I needed. And even as I heal and build a healthy relationship with and toward myself, I can’t imagine a time when the sentiments here will fail to be relevant to the basic conflicts of this identity, in this world that blames us for its own sin.
Lady Cassandra O’Brien feels like she should bother me more than she does. On principle she’s… not great, right, but in practice it’s hard to even frown that hard. The trans element is misjudged, probably. but I don’t see it as malicious. I know Davies has readily evolved as he’s learned, and admitted his past limitations.
There’s also this thing with progressive transgressive humor, right. You start by making a joke about something, someone unmentionable. The transgression isn’t in demeaning the unmentionable; it’s for acknowledging it. admitting to an uncomfortable world that it exists. Making it a joke gets it in the door at all. When later that existence is normalized such that we’re not discussing validity and rights and compassion, the initial jokes can come off as cruel and insensitive—the sort of thing the regressive sort will latch onto, to try tear down what legitimacy has been built.
If you keep moving long enough, any landmark that once was a step forward becomes a step back. But that marker, its inherent value isn’t gonna always sit in relation to where things are now.
Doctor Who came back 15 years ago. Davies is an angry, militant anarcho-humanist. The offhanded trans joke with Cassandra was probably tasteless then as it would be now, but all things considered to me it doesn’t read as mean-spirited. Kind of the opposite, weirdly; it’s in the spirit of, can we get away with pushing the window here? If we make it a dumb joke, just maybe! This is in contrast to some other things one could cite, like the dialogue in any given Toby Whithouse episode—or, you know, Gareth Roberts. As a person. I know how Davies’ mind works, at least in creative terms, and so try as I might to disassemble this, it’s… fine?
That angry queerness is what connects 2005 Doctor Who to the last time the show was regularly broadcast, and in some ways back to its anarchist, marginalized roots. If we’re gonna get prescriptive, this is to my mind the mode that the show should be working in.
With the Cartmel era, Ace of course is meant to be… bi at least, if not finding her feet as a lesbian. And then serials like The Happiness Patrol, well. For those outside UK queer circles, section 28 may possibly not mean much in 2020, but it’s no accident that this tale of the state suppression of public displays of melancholy—everyone is compelled to be happy all the time, right—hits at the exact moment as legislation banning public displays of, depiction of, discussion of, homosexuality. Under the terms of that very law we can’t talk about how it’s illegal to be gay—but illegal to be sad? Just reverse the polarity and the censors will never notice. Then we can paint the TARDIS pink, and fill the story with glitter and candy—
Or… by 2018 standards, I guess we can rescue Amazon from the evil labor organizers so that society doesn’t collapse without its cheap merchandise.
The McCoy era of course deeply informed Davies. The 2005 episode, “The Long Game,” is based on an old spec script he wrote at the time for the Seventh Doctor and Ace. If you reach back, there is sort of a long predecessor to The Happiness Patrol in The Macra Terror—my sometimes-vote for maybe the best story of the Troughton era—which itself is a story Davies referenced at his best and most bonkers, in “Gridlock.”
Which, speaking of trans jokes, is a word that… I just… misread as another word entirely.
Basically, Doctor Who should be batshit and earnest, and it needs to have something to say. My mind so often reels when people assert the opposite, as with the popular fan response to Ghost Light, In that story, Ace gives a haunted monologue about a formative memory of a hate crime she witnessed against her friend. Apparently that whole scene, and by extension the serial and the era in general, is prime cringe because Ace references “the white kids” when she herself is white. “The white kids firebombed it!” the fans will chuckle at each other.
The same fans who think the one flaw in Talons is a shitty giant rat puppet.
(Which is, incidentally, the very best part of the serial. It’s so charming!)
It was such a good thing for this fandom when all the teenage girls began to rush in about 15 years ago, terrifying the aging-out middle-class white cis dudes. And that’s who Davies brought to the game. That’s who he wanted. That’s who he knew would make a difference.
Davies was right. For its own health, the fandom needed a massive change in its gender makeup. It was a Big Trans plot the whole time. His long game, if you will.
When Trent Reznor sings “you,” in most cases he’s talking to the other part of himself—call him, Mr. Self Destruct. After Reznor’s own downward spiral that bottomed with a near-death experience on his Fragile tour, his 2005 album With Teeth is largely about recovery. 2013’s Hesitation Marks is about that battle’s return after an age, his musical avatar’s id reasserting itself and the struggle for control resuming with a little more self-awareness this time around.
With Teeth in particular is to me one of Reznor’s most fascinating albums. The whole thing exists in this dazed, sober limbo where Reznor seems to gaze around him, notice how much time has passed, and wonder exactly how he might function as a real person after he’s missed so much along the way.
“Only” (2005, With Teeth)
As fatuous as “Only” may be—the subsumed comedy to so many NIN songs a right up front this time—it’s also weirdly affirming as a recovery anthem. The music holds this uneven smirk while Reznor asserts that, no, that person doesn’t exist; it’s only him now. It almost needs to be as silly as it is, to undercut the drama of the old persona that he means to peel away. “No,” the song says. “You don’t get control here. I’m allowed to mock you.”
The chunky 2/4 backing serves as a loopy funhouse mirror of “Closer.” The lyrics quote “Down In It,” then twist the lyric into a reflection on his behaviors that led him to this point. Musically, Reznor seems to be taking a step back and going, “Yeah, that… that whole era of my life was pretty absurd, huh. Christ, that wasn’t me; that was never even a real person. I can’t let that affect me anymore. Well, I’m here now. It’s okay. I’m fine. I guess.”
You take Reznor’s (character’s) sort of ongoing dialogue with the other unwanted aspect of himself, and pair it with his curiously persistent themes of transformation or becoming—when I say that NIN often feels really super transy to me, this is what I mean. It’s a starting point, anyway.
“Everything” (2013, Hesitation Marks)
That concept to “Only” sort of comes back eight years later in “Everything.” This time, though, there’s a dark undertone. The assertion here—I survived everything—it’s less triumphant than it sounds. There’s a shade of denial; of pushing down that unwanted persona away as it threatens to bubble back to control—pretending it’s gone while it sits, waits.
You never really recover from mental illness or addiction, right. That’s not how it works. You just learn how to cope and manage better. The scars will always be a part of you, lurking as part of your base code. Being so incautious as to say, ha ha, I’m better now; it’s fine—you’re setting yourself up for problems.
There’s this interesting sequence to Reznor’s albums. His big opus that he’ll never live down is of course 1994’s The Downward Spiral. And that’s both the anchor and the weight that affects everything in its wake. That album has at least three direct sequels: first comes 1990’s The Fragile, then With Teeth and Hesitation Marks—each replacing the previous one and telling a slightly different story. The “Downward Spiral” theme from throughout that album keeps reemerging in odd, distorted forms as Reznor tries to escape its shadow—the seeming implication in Hesitation Marks being, for all his growth and change, he will never escape either that legacy or the damage that its story represents. There’s a part of him that will always be Mr. Self Destruct.
That push for recovery, it starts as early as “The Fragile”—weakly, helplessly, almost as a plea, as the album traces its own roller coaster of emotion. “We’re In This Together” strikes me as a particularly curious read, when you take what I say about Reznor and “you.”
“We’re In This Together” (1999, The Fragile)
Once you accept that most of Reznor’s music is about his own mental health struggles, in particular his relationship with his self—and then once you notice how very transy how much of his music feels, one gets some kind of a vibe from lyrics like “You’re the queen and i’m the king/Nothing else means anything.”
None of this of course is to impose any particular reading on Reznor himself as a person. Whatever his deal is, it’s his own deal. I’m not his therapist; I’m not in his head (thank God). I have no interest in projecting anything on a real person. I’m just noticing the way that his art hangs together, and how well it lends itself to reflect a certain set of ideas that… I guess always made an unspoken sense to me.
Of the three main Gems, Garnet’s story has always seemed the most muted and hazily defined. If you go back with the understanding that she is trans (as one of many dimensions to the metaphor she embodies), her whole character arc of learning to be honest and open about who she is, embracing her inner complexity and allowing herself to be vulnerable, it takes on a lot more color. It all starts to open up and make sense in a similar way to Amethyst’s and Pearl’s inner journeys.
From the start it’s just taken as read that Garnet is who she says she is. But she asserts this so strongly as to be rigid in her attitudes toward herself and her potential, and as to not let anyone in. She has to learn how to be a verb, and not just a noun. A person, not just an identity.
There’s this sort of fear that letting people know her too closely, or performing outside of this narrow definition she’s made for herself, will negate her identity, cause them to respect her less on her own terms. Which is not an entirely unwarranted fear, as we see in the show.
So her journey is about learning that essential trust in the truth of who she is, so that she doesn’t have to be defensive about it, protect it all the time. So that she can feel free to just live.