Episode Five: Fundraising

This text was commissioned through Decolonial Hacker’s 2024 Open Call and edited by Sanja Grozdanić, Guest Editor.

THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT HAVE BEEN DOWNLOADED is a serialised novella about twink death, Kurt Cobain, and the history of the trans internet. The story unfolds across two parallel timelines and from the perspective of two protagonists: a fictionalised version of Kurt Cobain just before his death in 1994, and a trans influencer—Edie—living in the US in 2034. The pair travel across the USA in opposite directions, looking for the source of two interconnected paranormal phenomena disrupting their lives and genders. The recent past and the near future are both presented in states of near collapse, bookending our tumultuous ‘now’, which is represented by non-fictional interjections that mediate and contextualise the story.

While Kurt is occupied with a national conspiracy involving a sinkhole in Barbados code-named ‘Metabolic Rift’, Edie is investigating the origins of a pandemic decimating the gay male community. Twink death is now a real and deadly phenomenon, and as Edie navigates her own transition, she finds herself right in the middle of it.

Here, we find Edie meditating on the value form of gender. Taking up Wren Ariel Gould’s writing on the ways trans affirming activists consolidate a ‘trans capitalist realism’ in which anti-capitalist routes to transition are rendered impossible, and the white, wealthy trans person is presented as the target of a bio- and necro-politics materially directed at low-income trans people of colour, we can argue that the way capital is generated and circulated within trans communities similarly colludes with our own abjection. Edie certainly colludes. On one level, she is aware of both the differentiated valuations afforded to the labour of gender and graded exposure to precarity. Yet she is ultimately unwilling to concede that, although social and cultural capital is built and deployed to raise financial capital for transition in ways that mimic mutual aid, such practices properly shore up, rather than subtend, neoliberal authoritarianism.

Oh, and she discovers that she can talk to Kurt on Grindr.

EPISODE FIVE: FUNDRAISING

Edie had been driving all day and she was exhausted. Pulling off Route 76 near Pittsburgh, PA, she found a motel that looked less than two decades old, if down-at-heel enough to be affordable. The girl on the evening shift held Edie in an ugly stare as she handed over the key, but Edie was rewarded in her calculations by a $30 room and no further violence. Damn it, though. Edie was so sure she’d been passable when she left the house this morning, even for middle America. She guessed they had trans people here now too, and so Amber on reception knew what to look for when judging a prospective guest. The ID Edie handed over probably hadn’t helped. Ah, shit. Maybe it wasn’t Amber’s exposure to visible trans people after all.

Edie dropped her rucksack by the door and lay face down on the nearer queen-sized bed. The shiny nylon coverlet was soon sticky with exhaled condensation, so Edie shimmied upward and placed her head, neck twisted, on one of the too-full pillows. The movement dragged her hands down to her sides, thumbs resting against the widest part of her hips. Edie tried to picture what her torso looked like from above. She felt her arms flaring out from her shoulders and imagined a triangle plotted at forty-five degrees from the nape of her neck to her fingertips, like those drawn by the fingers of internet transvestigators onto paparazzi photos of suspiciously gendered celebrities. This triangle was preceded by its inverse. The wrong way up but right way round for Edie, with butch, square shoulders and slim hips, this was how she’d imagined her body stood at the gas stations along the way, and it persisted into the car, one arm out the window, tight wife-beater showing off her modest, but still decidedly masculine, delt definition. It was embarrassing to reach for that image now that a real interaction had spoiled it. Maybe Edie should consider getting body masculinisation surgery as well.

Edie rolled onto her back and reached for the phone in the pocket of her jeans. Where was her GoFundMe at? Underneath the platform’s lime green sunrise logo, Edie admired a picture of herself looking stern. Actually, it was two pictures, with two cropped out of view: a grid of photo ID prints pinned to a fridge and carefully photographed, uploaded to achieve a studied balance of both nonchalance and intimacy, without allowing potential donors to get too close. Only one of the rectangles showed Edie’s full face. There were pictures where she looked more handsome, more cunty, less lonely—more like the influencer she was, or was trying to be. But the choice of this image was a deliberate construction. First off, Edie looked like a guy in it—masculine enough to feel comfortable with it being spread around the internet; to convince people that she could and would pass, but not so much that her fundraising would appear jarring. She had to be hot, but not overtly sexy. It was better to appear a little vulnerable, or failing this, evoke a desire for friendship and familiarity in those who saw her on the feed. For all these reasons, this photo had been chosen. And was she or was she not giving face?

Despite this, Edie was not even halfway to her goal of $90,000. Top surgery was still legal for over-eighteens in New York City, unlike most of the country, and increased demand from patients out of state was causing costs to rise exponentially. It was also ever more difficult to fundraise, since theoretically, anyone in the red ‘ban’ states could be fined or even imprisoned for helping a person transition. GoFundMe itself would probably be sued eventually. Edie wished there was an anti-capitalist route to transition, but there simply wasn’t. Not that she could think of anyway. Her mind could only conjure a baroque tableau of the current market: the for-profit crowdfunding platform’s board of directors watched their dividends soar as they skimmed increasing percentages from each pledge, while on the TV in the corner of the board room, anonymous Republican lawmakers (Edie was too much of a himbo to know their names) condemned the transgender influence seducing your kids, as a mob waving chainsaws and AK-34s stormed the Capital, pushing aside the assembled vanguard of the Alphabet mafia, loosing rounds into a drag queen librarian’s skull.

And in the middle of it all, Edie. Her fundraiser on the company tickertape, her name slandered by the Speaker of the House, her body slain on the steps of the nation. In her fucked-up fantasy, it was she who was primary target and object of this bio-capital and necro-politics. Not the midnight daughters of the original street queens; not those girls surviving on a vial of oestrogen and a prayer; not the runaway kids sleeping rough beneath trees or—if they didn’t manage to escape, swinging from them—but Edie, the rich, white transsexual from New York City.

Of course, trans kids (which, to be honest, was now anyone under twenty-five), and particularly their relationship to the internet, were still one locus of a rabid moral panic. So, it wasn’t an entirely narcissistic fiction to imagine herself this way. Just a little short-sighted.

It was lucky she had her streaming, Edie thought. A little bit of supplementary income, flying under the radar of gendercidal regulators. She had her regular monetizable shit on TikTok and YouTube, content that functioned essentially as a vehicle for advertising which she was happy to endorse as part of a rare sponsorship. Her less vanilla output found a home on OnlyFans, though even this was pretty mild; if Eddie carried the metaphor, the flavour of these videos was something like Stracciatella or Raspberry Ripple, an inoffensive base with a touch of naughtiness swirled through. In the short time that Edie had been in this line of work, she’d come to refine her online identity into a marketable brand. Just as she’d done with her GoFundMe banner, she’d figured out a way to not only emphasise her assets, but make people want to pay for them, or pay her because of them. It had been a process of trial and error, but Edie had eventually found her niche within the femboy community. Popular on boards such as 4chan in the mid-2010s, the term had been experiencing a resurgence of late due to the twink death epidemic. With a substantial subsect of young men turning to Bicalutamide and home IPL devices in the hopes of warding off the newest gay plague, a few had found joy in their new feminine expression and were eager to experiment with fashion, make-up, and even more HRT. Edie was more than happy to act as their guide.

Her content gave subtle cues to this potential audience: she was not a femboy per se, but her history as a girl coupled with her fascination for her parents’ scene-kid days went a long way. In these precarious times, Edie thought it prudent not to pigeonhole herself. Chatty vlogs and historical deep-dives offered a semblance of (monetizable) community. But transition was expensive, and as twinks were felled, those remaining became more lucrative across the board, including on the more adult side of the web. That’s just supply and demand, baby.

Tossing her phone away, Edie rolled off the mattress to go and retrieve her laptop. She threw both herself and the computer back on the bed and popped the MacBook’s lid. After first signing up to the motel’s free WIFI, Edie typed onlyfans.com into her internet browser and hit return. Despite her exhaustion from driving, it was a good hour of the day to go live. As she set up the stream, Edie focused on the tips she’d make and the surgeries she could afford. Her profile was hardly raunchy—keeping in mind her young audience it was mostly chatting with some flirtatious moments; basically just a way for her to cross-pollinate platforms. Edie was in the middle of a conversation with a subscribed regular when a comment from a username she didn’t recognise popped up in the chat.

Cum on hunny take ur shirt off show us ur big fake tits

Had Edie not been professionally dissociated and a New Yorker this would have fazed her more. Instead, she squeezed and shook her chest in the direction of the screen and dispatched a reply she hoped would deflect the situation and allow her to continue with her PG tone and regular clients: ‘these are aux naturel, baby’. Usually, this small amount of interest worked to minimise further interactions while insuring against the harassment that likely followed outright rejection—but for some reason, this man was offended.

Oh sure its just the oestrogen right

Now Edie was annoyed. Doing her morning pages the following day, she would chalk up her reaction to camming without having processed the day’s acute dysphoria, but right then, Edie was only aware of an unsourceable discomfort with the comment. It was ‘the oestrogen’ that had produced Edie’s boobs; but it was spontaneously occurring in her body, not elevated by an exogenous compound. What did the commenter mean? That Edie was a femboy taking E? A trans woman denying she’d had surgery? A cis woman with a boob job? This man—for it had to be a man—was not a subscriber to Edie’s channel, had paid the minimum entry fee to the stream, and had tipped her nothing.

Tranny

Edie froze. She’d never been called the t-slur before. Jaw tight with fear, she watched as angry and supportive comments swarmed the chat:

he’s a guy dumbass

reporting u

he’s not a tranny he’s a beautiful man

A wave of rainbows, hearts, and trans flag emojis rolled down the panel, the irregularly-timed pings setting her heart on its own off-beat tempo. Each one made her feel even worse. It wasn’t just the initial shock and fear of being intimately insulted, or the shattering of the male privilege that had protected her so far, or even the fact she was now watching her followers defend her in (lightly) trans misogynistic ways without her intervention. At the centre of all this, Edie noted her own secret horror at being mistaken for a doll.

The laptop lid made a dead noise as Edie closed it defensively, kicking everyone out of the stream and shutting down the ongoing barrage of words and pictograms. She channelled her insecurity into anger. Fuck that guy for harassing her and making her lose money. Edie picked up her phone from where she’d abandoned it by the pillow, unlocked it and instinctively opened Grindr. Less than one hour in this godforsaken town and she’d already got a message from a new account. The profile had no photos, just the customary black rectangle of those too closeted or ashamed to break anonymity before a date. KC, 27. 4,060km away. Wtf. Surely there was a gay man in a closer radius who wanted to hook up with her. Or not, because she was an ugly tranny. Fuck this dude too, jerking around. Edie opened the message thread to delete it and inevitably read the contents.

Hello?

Can you help me?

And then thirty-eight minutes later:

I’m Kurt Cobain.