The Major’s Body final.FINAL Stand Together Complex

Graphic depiction heavily staggered colorations of a picture of Major from Ghost in the Shell, large text at the bottom reads The Major's Body Final.Final

This body’s always suited me. No other will do.

And—

Don’t die. Survive, no matter what.

***

I am a cisgender woman and when I wrote The Major’s Body I didn’t know it. How can that be? It’s simple.

I knew that I was AFAB, and I knew that I was a woman. That’s what I knew: that I was one. Not that I wanted to be; it just “was.” With “cis” and “trans” want becomes relevant. You don’t take them up until you want to, because they are social add-ons; whether you want to be seen as a gender nobody’s recognised in you before (trans) or you want to show solidarity with those trans people around you (trans, cis) nobody makes you externalise those words because the dominant mode is to pretend that they lack meaning. They are unnecessary, so it goes, because gender is rigid and cannot be changed. A girl is a girl and a boy is a boy, the norms say, and that’s that. Well, they’re wrong.

You can probably see it in the essays in the series. An uncomfortability; a rejection of definition; a bob-and-weave “No thank you” against the idea of what a woman should be. I didn’t like how people saw me as a girl and I didn’t like how people saw to define woman. Why do we find this dissatisfaction in a cisgender person? Because definitions are limiting, of course; because some people like to avoid conforming. But why else?

I’m autistic and more specifically I’m a “Pathological Demand Avoidant,” which means that when people tell me what to do or I perceive—and perceive does not mean hallucinate wrongly, it means (1) become aware or conscious of (something); come to realise or understand—demands, obligations, loss of autonomy, my nervous system responds to them as danger. It’s egregious to experience, and widely consuming. If I do what I’m told to it’s an excessive exhibition of invisible will, and if I don’t, it still felt awful (painful, repulsive) when you said it. This is my neurological reality. Now—

Gender as an immutable thing assigned at birth and never after investigated is, absolutely, a demand. Gender as a signifier of being, gender as behaviour, arbiter, applied definition. To be assigned a role is to be given a performance command.

I was told with no margin for reflection that I was a girl who would become a woman and the matter of me, because there was no room for choice, said— Oh??

The Wild One gif

Mildred: Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?
Johnny : Whadda you got?

The Wild One

There aren’t any girl quotes for the occasion—that I know of. See what I mean?

Being autistic and a Ghost in the Shell fan is a thing of two vibes. One: it’s a very autistically representative show. Two: it’s an autistically misrepresentative show, at least in translation (I believe this is carried from the source but have not checked it during the writing of this article). Reason one it’s misrepresentative: “autistic mode” is the term used for last-resort infosec: shutting down all lines of communication; allowing nothing either in or out of one’s cyberbrain. Going offline and lonesome, essentially. The series of perceptions ((2) interpret or regard (someone or something) in a particular way) necessary to arrive at that decision are not hard to intuit. Autism is a thing that hinders communication, sometimes, and for some of us always. But Always as in completely? No. The least verbal of us still extend communiques, which most people simply don’t comprehend and many of those around them don’t try to. Always as in definitively? There’s an argument for yes. But always as in only—no. We do not stop being autistic when we are looking you in the eye and performing a hyperlexic TED talk, which is as vital to recognise as it is that there’s nothing better about those of us who can or will do that than the ones who can’t or won’t. If “autism” means “no communication,” then autistics with communication accommodation needs (again: all of us at some time or another, and some of us always) will not get them met. If “autistic” means “shut off,” then the assumption becomes people who are not shut off (in ways you can see) are not autistic—and autistic people who appear shut off must want to be. It must be their ultimate state. The general “we” is encouraged not to listen to the more oblique, from our perspective, missives. Their connective attempts are rebuffed, abandoned, neglected, and killed. Does that make you sad?

“Autistic” is a claimed label but it is not about want in the same way that “cis” or “trans” are. A trans woman could say “I am a woman” and be telling the truth; she says “I am a trans woman” for the sake of solidarity and to inform. An autistic person will say “I am autistic” with those intentions but primarily to express concrete limitations. It hurts me to do certain things. It punishes my body. Things you think are normal and expected. There are things that are beyond me.

But then—is “trans” a label taken out of similar necessity? To say “I am autistic” is to risk receipt of prejudice, both demographic and interpersonal, because it is to mark oneself out. It is said as an attempt to receive comprehension; both that those prejudices are wrong (hahaha, look at me, I am better than the vision you disdain!—a fool’s errand and a lost cause, but such is a desperate reflex) and that they are based on misunderstanding: I’m not impatient with you because I’m a haughty bitch, I’m impatient to you because your communication choices literally perplex me, you won’t help, and I can feel the label on my shirt like it’s a pin that is stabbing me. It’s a request for, if not respect, at least tolerance (disgust tempered by understanding)—”Please don’t hate me because you don’t know why I implied something I didn’t know I was implying when I tried to say a straightforward, literally spoken sentence.” For example. And to say “I am trans,” for those who do, is to express a parallel need for care. Please just let me live, I am dealing with a lot here. I can’t do everything the same as you probably, on average, expect. What’s cis, then? Allistic is the word for non-autistic, and it’s useful. Would an allistic use it to mean “I have spent a lot of time coming to terms with what I am and how that works and why, in the context of this world, and I recognise your accommodation needs, your lesser demographic numbers, the pressures against you, and that you are as real as me?”

There’s an episode of Stand Alone Complex where the Major, Batou and Togusa investigate an institution for teenagers who have a condition known as “Cyberbrain Closed Shell Syndrome.” (Notice that closed; shut off motif again.) It’s called a “vocational aid centre” and is evidently a sanitarium; a place to put the too-odd-for-normal-society and exploit their available skills. Cyberbrain Closed Shell Syndrome is alleged to be intrinsically dangerous, both to the patient and to society through their variously incited and projected violence. The children Togusa sees are: minors who are desperate to be online. They, like the average person of this story’s world, have cyberbrains, and they are at peace only when they are allowed to use them to access the net. This access is restricted as an enforced mode of discipline that is designed to change and control their essential nature (it won’t). They are loyal to each other, individual, helpful, affectionate and wary. They vary in spoken verbosity. They are autistic and they are just like me.

My cyberbrain was fleshy and necessitated use of first a family desktop then a laptop, then a different laptop, then a tablet, then a phone. When one is autistic, things hurt, people make fun of you for things you don’t perceive—(1) or (2)—and mock your heartfelt interests and the only endless outlet for your curiosity and your emotional motion away from that scouring sensory horrorshow is the net. The other thing that it offers is understanding; friendship; actual respect; affirmation. Feeling like an equal human being. When that’s denied to you it isn’t “fair.” It wrenches. It was my day. Today’s my online day.

Have you ever turned off your pain receptors to complete a mission? I have. It’s called dissociation (or, accidental, interoception) and it happens a lot. When you’re able to go online, you can dissociate without loss of communicative benefits: your pain receptors are off but your joy and triumph ones are still on. You can wrench the hatch open on a tank or research a publisher that’s conning creatives or ignore a guy who’s talking about what you’d look like naked and whether or not disabled people should be assigned DNRs and you can also check in with your friend who’s at a show or see some art that makes your heart swell or make a joke that works on four levels. At the same time. Both. All. That almost levels us off at a neutral experience that day (haha!). You can deal with the physical negatives you’re escaping later (reattach the busted-off arms again; deal with the consequences of excess cortisol; touch something pleasant until the tension in your back and neck subsides) but you can balance them with positive digital ones coming in like 01101100011011110111011001100101.

Like Jesus, the Major’s teenage years are unwritten. We’ve seen her as a child, newly cyberbodied, learning to walk well. We’ve seen her as an adult, leading a team, unmatched tactics, daring, clever. She nurtures Togusa and manages Batou and seeks comfort in Aramaki without it being obvious enough to become inappropriate for a workplace mentorship. She has people she bangs and is friends with and wistful lost loves. She respectfully mentors. She knows how to be an adult and she was a child when she was a child. But here’s what else we know:

She’s always in another body, another one, another one here as well, a new avatar. She’s watching. She’s researching. She’s prepared. She’s listening. She’s analysing and making contacts. She’s searching. She’s jumping. She’s falling. She’s—stimulated. Always, always, she’s seeking stimulus. How—

—How is she when she doesn’t surf? I wonder what she does when she wakes up.

When the Major was a teenager she was lost online for years, and nobody can tell me different. Maybe through dips, maybe in long swoops, maybe any which way you like. She had to immerse in it to learn it like she knows it. She had to find who she was by letting it all go, taking it all in, and seeing what stayed. She learnt how to ESCAPE FROM. She had to do this because I had to do it, and that’s how it works. Someone let her take her day. Or she found a way to take it.

Being autistic is not something that’s made easy by the way that we’re expected to not be it. If pattern recognition (Cayce Pollard? Also autistic) is attuned to misogyny then misogyny—for example—is hard to unsee and if misogyny is something that threatens you specifically then you may find yourself trying to escape an ever-present miasma by sidestepping your position as its target. Sometimes we can try that by avoiding gender and sometimes we can try it by avoiding our own bodies. “The net is vast and infinite”; so, the net must have places where it’s not. (Where there’s no misogyny, is what I mean there. The “it” in that sentence signifies misogyny. I explain carefully like this because I learnt I would be misunderstood) If you’re trying not to be in your body because you know people want to use it certain ways and you feel everything that happens to it real extremely, then you’ll probably try not to be in it a lot.

But that’s not being autistic. That’s being traumatised. That’s being traumatised because your autism is not accommodated and you live in a world that is hostile. Autistic and trans are very similar, in these ways, and many of our shared number are the overlap in the venn diagram.

Can you be a cyborg without being trans?

Say I’m a person living in the world of hit anime Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. If my arm is off and I need a new one, but there’s no Lady Arms on the shelf and they won’t get a restock til after my insurance runs out, then when I say “Fine, give me whatever you have,” and they give me a Man’s Arm or a Boy’s Arm, depending on matters of fit, then what happens to “me”? What becomes the Gender of Theseus? Does this new item that’s part of me remain a Man’s Arm, or is Iggy Pop correct; is it now simply “my arm”? Would you oblige me to spend my life saying “Oh I’m a woman—except for my right arm. That’s a man’s arm. If we shake on that side then you’ll afford me more authority, haha.”

The authority of a man’s handshake would not be respected should it come from a person perceived (either meaning (1) or (2)) to be a woman. It would be something due accommodation—which is to say it would be notably outside of the norm, and therefore ripe for persecution by the vicious.

If you meet a cyborg and they’re full prosthetic, do you ask them Oh, were you always the gender I am assuming of you right now? That seems rude. Perhaps you would.

Still from eXistenZ: gross little fleshy veiny neck plug-in
eXistenZ (1999)

As far as I was aware, before I became a cyborg of the eXistenZ mode, I did not know any trans people in “real life” (or: offline). But that was a long time ago.

Because I am a cyborg I am online. Because I am autistic and seek community I know a lot of trans people and have done so for a long time. Because I experience sentience as sapience I experience life as an engine of curiosity, and so I listen to what they say and talk about. Because I am autistic I experience a premise as a premise, and work from there. Thus:

Trans person: I am trans, a trans woman.

Me: This person is trans, a trans woman.

Events: [offer nothing to rebut this premise]

Me: I retain this perspective.

Here is another example:

Me: My friend is a girl.

My friend: In fact, I am not a girl.

Me: The premise has been rebutted. This is not a girl. I need more information. I must seek it.

[I learn about gender variance, spectrums, trans potential, extant trans identities, etc.]

Here is another:

My parents: Telling the truth is good. Intellectual curiosity is good. Our essential language and behavioural patterns imply that gender is pretty much girls and boys, and that’s it.

Me: Alright

Events: Trans people exist!

Me: Oh, the premise has been adjusted. Intellectual curiosity is good, so I’ll accept that, and learn more about it in order to gain confidence in this new premise.

And one more:

Trans people: We go through dark nights of the soul to discover ourselves and find our true gender despite society discouraging that violently.

Me: Seems unfair that only they have to do that. I should try; ethics require it. I can see ways that I’ve resisted my assigned gender, and there’s nothing so special about me that would give me an out on being trans on principle.

[I try at length to imagine being perceived as a man, by myself and others]

Me: I feel terrible. Really, really awful. I must just be afraid to be trans. Better try harder.

[I try harder; more options]

Me: This sucks so much!!! But the premise… Surely the premise remains.

[I remember that trans theory discusses gender euphoria]

Me: I should try and imagine what that would feel like… for me?

[I do this]

Me: I’m a GIRL??????

I am autistic and a woman and since I discovered I was a cis woman instead of just a designated one I have dissociated at such a majestically reduced rate that I feel like I’m real in a way I’ve not before. I surf, but there are things I do when I wake up. I—

I have my goddamn choice.

All because I accept the premise of other peoples’. Human curiosity brought Tachikomas to life. But I’m real, and it brought me to it too.

This gender, and this body that carries an easy understanding of it, means something good to me now. Because I understand, having let everything go, and taken for myself the freedom to reject obligation, that I want it. I no longer feel miseries about being inadequate, because I am myself, and that’s explosive outwards, not reductive inwards. This is the right kind of woman to be because it’s the kind of woman that I am. There is less to shrink from when I define the environment. Our first and most enduring environment is our body.

To “live without boundaries” as Oshii’s Major dreams of is not to live without desire. It is not to live without knowledge, or form, or wearing a specific jacket every day. It is to live without the requirement to do, or not do, that. It is to let ourselves find who we are. It is to allow for the possibility of a self that’s beyond construction.

The Major’s Body was supposed to help me understand “what it meant” that a constructed iconography of a constructed woman held communicative power, and what that power was being used for. But the Major’s body means this: your form is the presence of your will. The physical position of your extant human rights. Your one external mnemonic device. The pieces mean what you want them to say; they’re there to contain what is you, and carry the labels necessary for the continuation of that you. It’s a sovereign nation. Anybody who doesn’t listen—

Kusanagi\s Watch, Stand Alone Complex episode 25

We don’t negotiate with terrorists.

 

Kanazuki: Ohh, you’re a tough critic. Are you saying that we members of the audience have a reality to which we should return?
Major: Yes, I am.
Kanazuki: For some who sit and watch the film, misery will be waiting for them the instant they go back to reality. You’re willing to accept responsibility for depriving these people of their dreams?
Major: No, I’m not. But dreams are meaningful when you work toward them in the real world.

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Claire Napier

Claire Napier

Critic, ex-Editor in Chief at WWAC, independent comics editor; the rock that drops on your head. Find me at clairenapierclairenapier@gmail.com and give me lots of money

2 thoughts on “The Major’s Body final.FINAL Stand Together Complex

  1. As a (hyperlexic) autistic trans femme who’s felt – oh so many things – towards the Major’s Body?

    Thank you for writing this series. I just came across it, and devoured it. I’ve previously tried to articulate to myself how I felt about the Major and her body. How she’s depicted, how her body is depicted. Transhumanism meets femininity.

    My relationship to that depiction as an intersectional feminist. My relationship to it as a woman-type (my gender is not binary, not very simply defined), my relationship as an autist (well, AuDHDer), and the very peculiarly autistic transhumanist trans femme overlap that (I feel) the Major represents.

    To sum up my prior feelings – I had previously felt that the Major *chose* to be the hypersexualised “ideal” (per the cishet male Gaze) binary-gendered feminine form, a physicality to match a sometimes-visualised interior. Which is a peculiarly trans metaphor, the idea of shaping one’s exterior to better match the interior.

    But also, an autistic one, and, I think maybe a peculiarly autistic femme one. High masking (in the autistic sense) but for one’s body. Your very flesh, your sex, your gender as performance, re: Judith Butler. But beyond that (forced) by society for femmes, a body (and mind) consciously playing or performing a role assigned (coercively) by society, living up to an expectation, as best as one knows how. A flawed one, maybe, (as cis neurotypicals would see it) but an attempt. One that can evolve (as the Major’s Body seems to evolve), as you understand the expectations, the *requirements for acceptance* better.

    I think I see a commonality here, in the cis and trans autistic femme experience, of that *trying*. That trying to parse and navigate a relationship to (binary cis neurotypical, cishet-male-Gaze shaped) femininity via the Major and her body. The ‘robotic’ (as autism is often depicted), yet feminine, Other. While not fitting, in some way.

    And it was… surprising… to find to such, well, in-depth gender feelings on the page, written by an autistic cis woman, that resonated so much with my own. (I will admit I read this series expecting to find a later confession of some kind of trans or non-binary status. As generally speaking, only trans people write in such a detailed way about gender. I mean, Butler themself is non-binary.)

    I suppose the part that surprised me most was the depth on analysis about the conflict between gender, transhumanism, autonomy/agency, and the (cishet male) Gaze. I’d had only minimal exposure to the manga, only exposure to the movies, and Stand Alone Complex in its two parts.

    (I’ve debated whether I wanted to see/read more – whether SAC represented the “best” of the Major and this, well, transhumanist lense on gender. I think you’ve settled that debate for me – SAC is the best to date, and everything else is a confusing, contradictory downgrade.)

    Your analysis echoes conversations I’ve had with other trans people, trying to parse the cis Gaze – particularly, of the trans femme performance of femininity for cis people. Aka “passing”, as it’s called in trans circles – performing one’s gender in a way that trans bodies are read as being cis.

    And particularly, of desires vs this concept – such as, if unlimited autonomy/agency existed to reshape oneself? If society was less transphobic, less enbyphobic/non-binary-hostile? Then what would you *be*? And what influences that.

    How we’re coerced into certain forms, certain performances, to help ease our navigation through a (cissexist, cisheteropatriarchal) society. Or to make a stand, to deliberately reject that role (as some non-binary people do), of choosing other paths, exploring other ways of being. And the cost thereof.

    Whether to trying to “pass” is desirable. What shapes “passing”. Why we do it. What it requires. What sacrifices to make. What the limits are.

    Various current day questions about gender-affirming surgery touch on this. And – to clarify to an audience of strangers – cis people undergo this too! Cosmetic surgery exists to help cis people perform their gender role better in the way they want (even if coerced to do so somewhat by society) – trans people just have a starting point a little further away. If they want this at all, that is. (Not all do – and that want and that choice and that bodily autonomy/agency is core to this topic, I feel.)

    I guess to get back to my main point, having explained my frame of reference? You pointed out the many ways in which the Major’s choice was not a free one. Even beyond the impacts of various Gazes, her body quite literally was not her own. And that changes the trans transhumanist discussion of the Major for me. In ways (I feel) that mirrors how, up until recently (and still often don’t, depending on location and financially), trans and non-binary people didn’t get autonomy/agency to choose their own forms. The gender binary, the sex binary, reinforced by the available, uh, transformations.

    Like how the Major is limited, in a way, to the “parts” that are available. “Standard” sexbot gynoid. But how she makes use of that? And her feelings on that? Tragically underexplored by the source material.

    Anyway, I just wanted to add this little bit of random autistic trans femme transhumanist thought on this topic, as well as my gratitude.

    Thank you for posting this series 🙂

    1. Thank you for your thanks—and thank you for the content of your comment. It is all very valuable to me.

      I can absolutely see why you would expect a non-cis development in the meta narrative of this series—in some ways I, at least mathematically, expected it myself, as described, because being able to notice my own struggle to perceive what.. what IS all this, all this gender… it seems inevitable that someone asking cant have been handed the right one. But I think that that speaks to another point that you bring more out of than I managed to articulate: when I said “Can you be a cyborg without being trans?” what I was reaching for was something like… if there comes a point where *everyone* must choose if they should be gendered, if everybody must cross a boundary of embodiment to receive their rightest expression of their own understanding—and cyberisation is that point, purely conceptually—then cis people are as much “in” that choice as anyone. And if that point can exist conceptually, then the inherent potential of and interaction with that imagined choice exists already. It’s just than in (for want of a better word) cishumanism, only trans people are expected to be making that choice, or even potentially making that choice, at any given moment. And that’s very fucking goofy, in my opinion.

      For me in childhood “femininity” meant enacted knowledge of something ritualistic that I had no initiation into, and autistically I have felt inherently oafish in a way that seemed to separate me from feminine acceptance without a notable amount of self-sacrifice. To pass—to pass from my perspective—felt like it would mean copying something I didn’t understand, which was too painful (autism!), and yet not to feel “successful” (—but also not to feel at home in myself—) felt degrading. But there was a kind of pride in that, because at least it was a choice I made to be (to feel) degraded before others instead of within myself. As I’ve grown since the revelations described in the article my understanding of femininity in the ritualistic sense has changed… I’m just not really ashamed to be ignorant any more, because I don’t feel inherently worthless, because I’m not rejecting myself all the time. So “not knowing yet” doesn’t feel like it proves anything about me.

      Discovering a way to blend whatever solidity that oafish feeling can offer me with whatever I want to get out of being perceived as ~a lady~ is very interesting so far. I’m having a good time. And it doesn’t feel *unlike* the weird hanging position of Major Kusanagi, though it’s certainly not copying her work

      I guess… juxtaposition of tuff ‘n’ titty is, for our time, a very widely applicable shorthand.

      lmao.

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