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A Hauntological Affair or,
I Love My Spectre of a
Cock
By Knowah Holder

(Texts between Rhea and I)
Sometimes I have dreams/nightmares of being a stone top. The A-Shirt wearing, hard nippled and strapped up; Stone Top.
One of the first things I bought when I started hormones was a glowing royal blue leather harness. Adorned with a gloss finish and glowing steel ‘O’s and ‘D’s, it smudges with enough contact to the back of thighs and soft asses. It gets scratched up from facial piercings and can make such sweet sounds when in contact with a drooling cheek at the right angle. I bought this gorgeous thing, paired it with a void black curved dildo, and waited for my dick to die.
“Call it what it is!”
Something beckons from below.
“It’s an affair!”
Another speaker calls from the mezzanine.
An affair. I’m having an affair with my cock—on my cock I mean. I’m cheating. Well, I’ve been cheating for a long time but only really in thought—Never, Ever in practice! But then I met Rih— pronounced Ree, in her bio like… yeah babe. And at first, it was a one-time thing. A real I’m-only-doing-this-cause-I-just-got-this-unbelievable-harness-and-dildo type thing and a is-it-really-my-penis-that-makes-me-hate-sex kind of thing. That’s not just something you can tell you’re cock. That’s a 25-year relationship thrown in the trash. And what’s hilarious about telling your Lucian Grandmother you’re a trans woman is you can see the image of some satanic leveller cleaving off my partner repeating behind her eyes. She smiles a bit, however; when you mention you’re still only really dating women. She of course wouldn’t think that someone like Rih would have a wang to match mine, not like she’s even seen her or knows more than her first and last name and that she’s from Africville but now lives in the Junction. She’s smiling and thinking “Yes, well at least that sounds like another cockless person for my grandson to be dating.”
Rih, simply put, loved to be fucked and to skip the poeticisms, we fucked. And it was both objectively and subjectively good. For both of us even. I told her about my torrid relationship with she who shall not be named but if ‘that’s’ a kind of sex she likes I have the necessary workarounds.’ When I sent a real low-def, warm orange, burning image of the package, she made quick work of letting everyone know there would be no problem. I mean the pair, the two of them together, forming this coalesced, immovable sculpture, sturdied by two glowing cock rings—what an image. That was the first time I cheated on my Biostrap. My Gock. Oh my God, how could I do that to my Princess Wand.

My partners. I would die for them, her, it.
I want nothing to do with her anymore, my stale, dysphoric sweetheart. My new cock though, the silicone limb, my lover on the low, I’ve never known anything like her. I was never this kind of person—before. Now I find myself calling my cock from the office at the Ad agency I work at, Cockette. I mean some days I even get the secretary to do it. Gary, or Larry, or Sasha? They let her know I’m staying at work late. She sits at the dinner table, my plate of food growing cold against the widening teak fissure. There’s space for ten as we like to entertain sometimes.
I never let her in on the fun anymore, inviting her to the pleasure. I fold her to my taints midpoint and round her like a clit. She’s in none of my pictures on Instagram, tucked away like some needy child. And she IS needy! So often people give her too much attention, or at least more than she deserves. I’ve grown cynical and vindictive in these marital disputes and cut off the taps and yet she’s still here, she stays. Never knowing when to quit it, lop herself off and drop dead.
But my new lover. Well, I guess it’s a threesome really. Me + my black hooked dildo + that delicious harness. That’s my polycule and we’re so fucking kitchen table. My new cock, my new lover doesn’t mind a mouth. My old cock was never a fan. My new boo will fill any hole, she’s truly a robust and agreeable problem solver. My old cock used to mystify me when we fucked.
We’d wake up in a daze, alone, in alleyways at the end of street corners in suburban developments, off trails in High Park, in so many bathrooms… and worse, cold in my own bed, weeping, confused. It took us too long to cut it out, we didn’t understand the issue. But finally, when you know you know.
Being a transbian and dating cis lesbians can be a trip sometimes. (this is how I originally wrote this and then went out later that night and hooked up with this trans girl who is closer to me than a stranger but not quite a friend and cute enough to crush over for just a touch too long anyhow the statement will probably just be: Being a transbian and dating/fucking lesbians can be a trip sometimes.) I know I could open the floor to the idea of Lesbian as its own gender perhaps but I won’t. Not here obviously, on a day like today.
The trip is, I get why someone wouldn’t want to touch my cock. She’s a woman scorned and deeply neglected. She’s furious as fuck and worst of all she looks like a man.

My copy of Trans Girl Suicide Museum
Hannah Baer talks about this understanding but refers to it as a haunting. Is every trans girl haunted? And if so, Is this just trauma porn? Baer writes “I tell a trans friend that cis girls used to want to fuck me, and now they have no idea what to do with my body, are afraid to touch my penis. “Of course they’re afraid…your body is haunted.”’
If everyone knows I’m a woman possessed, infested with duppies and djinn, is it all just unethical porn to be writing through this, throwing more proverbial tuck tape into the tragic archival hole of trans memoirs and stories, narrativizing yet another realization of the paranormal scourge, getting verbose about public exorcisms and how they’re so humiliating. And how exorcisms themselves are widely misunderstood. It’s not the arduous month-long affair of spell casting over my spastic, tiny, devilish body in a New England heritage building. Exorcisms are intakes, new doctors, consent forms, blood tests, dosage tempering, spellbinding, quitting your job and informing everyone of your ongoing exorcism. That’s why we look the way we do—haunted.
But not every trans girl is haunted. I think.
A lot of them just have dicks that they don’t know what to do with.
Tina tells me I need to look up Hauntology after reading this piece so I’ve been searching for Mark Fisher’s book Ghost Of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures which I’ll hope to find at Another Story, or Type Books, or She Said Boom, or Balfour Books when my sickness passes. A sickness that I picked up from trying to exorcise my dysphoria down the throat of this girl I ran into at Communist Daughter. Another good alternative method to exorcising your somatic desire for a flat pubic bone is through the dark art of Transference. Aka fucking until you feel literally anything other than the constant dread of your missed future, the imaginable impossibility.
My incredibly myopic understanding of Fisher’s hauntology, or rather, hauntological melancholia, is mourning the possibility of an inaccessible future, which in turn must come from mourning or understanding a past that did not exist but could have— a past that had the promise, the hope for some whole future that was somehow in some way interrupted. Fisher uses the era of the progressive 70s that he grew up in as a reference point, a decade that solidified modernity and sort of did away with great change, moreover revolution as a whole, at least in the West. Objects and ideas, political platforms and smartphones are never new, only upgraded. Revolution and invention have become obsolete. The melancholia comes from the visceral refusal to accept this reality as the way it is. When asked why this is exactly hauntological Fisher answers:
"Let’s put it this way: it’s easy to say, “Oh, things were great in the 70s, let’s go back to the 70s,” but I think the real issue is “What kind of future did we expect from the 70s?” I mean, there was a trajectory, and this trajectory was interrupted. And now we find ourselves haunted by this future that we vaguely expected at the time, and that was terminated somewhere during the 80s by the values related to neoliberalism."

My copy of Andrea Chu's Females
Reading the interview I couldn’t help but wish if there was some version of Estradiol and Spiro, or Bica, or Cypro, pills or solutions that actively interrupt and divert neoliberal and conservative shifting futures. Futures that are ultimately unimaginative, sexless, murderous, and vacuous. Can anyone bottle rioting? Please synthesize protesting into some sort of intravenous situation. When you Boycott do you chew it—like—on it’s own? Or with—like—peanut butter? Oh—capsules! Cool.
HRT is a fine but delicate needle that bridges the gap between the miserable present and the impossible. A present where “everything has already been done” and IS done, and haunts me. That proposed future with the masculinizing spectre like a Babadook, or Wendigo eating away at my will, perched in dark corners. The small bits of tiny blue are healing my haunting melancholia derived from quirky, pathological in-utero, primordial nostalgia.
I would be doing Andrea Long Chu so proud then. “Everyone is Female—and everyone hates it.” She writes in her canonical text Females. Those days when I wake shattered that I am simply the same are those moments of remembering it all could have been different. If you left me a female, I wouldn’t have hated it, I promise. I shake my fist at the 70s and then roll a morning joint, take my pills, shave, and read a small chapter and remember: You are crafting futures… not cheating.
We’ll revisit this when I’ve read Mark Fisher’s book ok.