I
There are two tabs open to the right of this one. The first reads SAP mae martin, and the second define sap. The definition that I most associate with the word is the third one offered up by google: the first describe energy, vitality; the second is historical, archaic, a tunnel to conceal an assailant’s approach to a fortified place. The third, the one that immediately comes to my mind, is the slang term: a foolish and gullible person. And I think that each of these definitions have a relationship to what it means to make trans art, to be trans in the current climate, both culturally and politically.
Mae Martin uses a parable to describe how they arrived at the title of their 2023 Netflix standup special: SAP. Describing a man running from a beast only to fall down a pit to discover another beast. The comedian calls it a double beast situash. The man in the parable is able to navigate to a branch, even as it begins to creak under their weight, and at some point, that branch is gonna give out. But according to Martin, he sees something at the edge of the branch.
Golden, glistening tree sap. It’s tree sap. And he puts it in his mouth and he’s like ‘is that…? That’s delicious.’ Guys, it’s positive. Wait. That’s it. No. Hello…? Okay. Uh… Trust me, I find it very positive. You gotta get on board, please, I’ve called the show Sap. You truly must get on board.
The special ends with Martin riffing on the sap of the parable, as something delicious and powerful; worth savouring and cultivating where we can. It allows them to end on a note of optimism. The special isn’t particularly bleak - the heavy themes are approached with a lightness of touch - and seems to be more about the absurdity of the world than it’s darkness. But the moment that jumped out at me, that almost physically struck me when I was watching the special, was the moment in which they said I don’t really wanna talk about gender. […] But I feel like I should talk about it because everyone else is.
They say that it’s difficult to talk about, that when something like gender affects you personally it’s difficult to debate, because if you get emotional you’ve already lost. Even when we’re able to tell our own stories, no matter the size of the platform, there’s that moment of needing to justify yourself - the legitimacy and existence of your gender - and with it, the legitimacy and existence of your art, your craft, your whole body of work. A body of work that will inevitably be seen as a trans body. I’ve written about this before, sometimes explicitly, sometimes in the margins. And whenever I return to these themes, that linger over me - and the work - like some vast, expressionist shadow, I’m compelled to acknowledge it. To justify it. And that can be tiring.
Verb: sap
gradually weaken or destroy (a person’s strength or power)
Right now, I’m planning new work about failure; about the cost of making work. Only now does it occur to me that this too is a kind of sapping, that to make work can weaken you; not every artistic gesture can be an empowering, emboldening one. Sometimes you just leave something on the page, and walk away from it a little weaker than you were when you sat down.
II
I’ve read about a quarter of Brainwyrms, the new novel by Alison Rumfitt. I was on a panel with Alison and other trans writers - Fey, Sarah, Jaye - at the BFI in December of 2022, where we talked about transness in horror. We brought clips with us to talk about (I chose Possessor), some more explicitly trans than the other, some more positive in their representation. We talked about the work, what it meant to use, and where trans horror might go next.
In the the introduction to Brainwyrms - which I won’t ruin the context of here - Alison laments I guess I’ll never know what sort of writer I would have been if I didn’t live in this fucking world that forces me to write about transphobia.
I’ve found myself wondering more and more if we’re forced to write about these things. When I co-founded TISSUE with Donna, it was with the aim of letting trans* writers present work that doesn’t always have to be about transness as it’s presented in culture; with our basement venue hopefully creating a place where we aren’t forced to write about transphobia. I hope that we’ve been living up to that, and that we can keep doing so. My favourite thing about TISSUE has been just how surprising everyone’s work has been: from faux Arts Council proposals to meme-ified academic presentation; speculative fiction to strange, angelic choruses.
Mae Martin acknowledges a less-than-angelic chorus when they make their necessary - and maybe somewhat begrudging - stop to talk about gender in SAP, and the proliferation of (cis) comedians offering routines one way or another; whether it’s the tired transphobia that Martin alludes to, or the “too challenging for ya?” routine that James Acaster does in Cold Lasagna Hate Myself 1999 (2021). And I think that the thing that’s empowering here is that Martin acknowledges not wanting to talk about gender, that to constantly have to do so is tiring.
I very rarely correct people when they get my pronouns wrong. I know that I should get better at it, that in a way that will also be what lets them get better. But there are some friends where my degree of out-ness is simply having pronouns in parentheses in a group chat. I like to think that that’s enough, but it isn’t. Sometimes I’ll wear a small red badge with my pronouns on it, which I was given to wear to a workshop I was teaching in December of 2022. I like to think that that’s enough, but it isn’t. Talking about gender is so tiring because it comes from people getting it wrong; it so often feels like a corrective act, and one that can still fall on deaf on ears.
An archaic definition of sap is to make insecure by removing the foundations of. The example given next to this definition is the sentence a crazy building, sapped and undermined by rats.
It’s this kind of sap that so often seems to lead to the constant justification of gender identity - and the need to add identity seems to complicate this even more - and the justification of work about it. Would we all talk about it, write about, worry about it, as much as we do, if we weren’t forced to? If it weren’t this fucking world that forces me to write about transphobia?
III
The definition of sap that surprised me the most was the archaic one: a tunnel that could conceal an assailant’s movement to a fortified location. This kind of sap seems like it has its fingerprints on the culture war: it’s a language of infiltration, of war. Of otherness. It’s so easy to imagine this extended metaphor in a hysterical column - a column I initially wanted to call right-wing, but that seems too narrow given where we’re going, if we’re not there already - that a public bathroom is some fortified space that’s somehow been infiltrated. The same can be said of sports fields and casting calls, boardrooms and bedrooms. The idea that we have somehow gotten here through routes that are unacceptable. That our saps have made saps of these people.
I’ve written a lot about a kind of speculative filmmaking; a poem in a Pilot Press anthology that imagines exploitation, or an extract from Long live the new flesh that dreams up gnarly, exploitative body horror. I find myself returning to this mystical, mythical screening room once again with an alien invasion film. A kind of trans version of the Marvel story Secret Wars, or the Cold War classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Some alien race making its way to earth and slowly but surely replacing the population; making their way from the bottom of the ladder all the way to the top.
I’m not sure if I want to draw a line from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to the story of trans invasion (in which we, naturally, root for the aliens), or because I have to; because I have to respond to the world around me.
In my many attempts to write my way into a novel, I’ve wanted to open with some musings on the problem of language; on Maggie Nelson observing the idea that it is idle to fault a net for having holes. That no one thing can catch everything. And I wonder if this digression in SAP, the introduction in Brainwyrms, and my subjective cinema, the movies in my mind, are all somehow a response to this: a language that we’ve all born out of necessity. Martin defines the gender spectrum through Beauty and the Beast: Gaston and Belle on one end, and a camp, singing candlestick in the middle. They say that it’s how they explain the gender spectrum to people: a language born from necessity.
IV
I had good intentions with this Substack. I thought of it as a place where I’d be able to put essays, ideas, and scattershot, unplanned pieces (like this one). A home for all my ideas that couldn't live anywhere else. The plan was to write for it once a month, with the hope that it would gradually build up some readers, and - if I was lucky - some of them would pay to subscribe in a way that would ease the precarious nature of freelancing, making it easier for me to write books, curate reading events, and teach. I still have that hope for this. But of course, my good intentions fell through immediately; I wrote for the Substack in January, and it has been untouched ever since.
I thought that Pride, that annual occasion where every queer freelancer is given a brief shortcut to the front of the line, would be the best chance to revive this newsletter. I could use pride hashtags when I post about it on Instagram that might draw some extra eyes to it.
I had good intentions for this piece. Of course, I called it “I don’t wanna talk about,” when all I’ve done is talk about it. Because I’ve had to; because even not talking about it draws attention towards it, makes it a proper noun It, a glowing neon sign IT. And then you talk about it because you have to. You write about it because you have to. I wanted to write more about the things from SAP that I liked: Mae’s impression of their dead; their graveyard of hypothetical children; and even my love of their stage presence. Mostly still, occasionally uncertain; falling back on physical tics and nervous laughs. That’s how I feel myself moving - or not moving - when I introduce writers at TISSUE, or give context for extracts when I give readings from books. I just finished watching the season of Taskmaster with Mae in it, and the offhand, seeming non-presence of gender - the ease with which their pronouns were used, the fact that nobody needed to comment on it - feels like not needing to talk about it.
There’s a lot that I wanted to write about, but instead, I wrote about gender.
i love this sam, and strongly relate to it. (also love that my silly lil ACE parody made a mark). whats frustrating to me is not just that we have to talk about "it," but we talk about (our) gender in terms of what "it" is - a conversation that is inevitably conceptual, and erases the embodied reality of how we live our lives.