Authors Priya Basil and Lina Meruane met at HAU2 in late June to discuss current feminist debates and read from Meruane’s new book “Coloquio de las quiltras”. This is an excerpt from that book, translated by Andrea Rosenberg.

Awkwardly arrayed around a low table, three panelists had been discussing the timely subject of gender transition. The event poster announced the topic and gave the title of each talk, but it did not give the presenters’ names; they were protected by anonymity and by a gruff Cerberus-dog who was monitoring access to the space. Lina squinted into the back of the room and saw blurry faces that she could not identify; too little was left of her eyesight after many years of plunder.

She set down the book she was holding with her teeth, Rachel Yoder’s “Nightbitch”, whose protagonist lycanthropically transforms into and acts like a dog and also set down the Virginia Woolf essay that Luna had devoured. With her snout now unencumbered, she loped over to the panel to listen to the conversation, or what was left of it. Judging by her watch, she had missed the talk on Despentes, a controversial gun dog—a setter, to be precise—who besides being a novelist had also engaged in prostitution and advocated for legislation to protect sex workers, a high percentage of whom were trans bitches. Lina must have also missed the presentation on Preciado, who, even before his transition from philosopher to queer theorist to nonbinary creature, had adopted the sobriquet Landless Bulldog.

Lina the mutt appreciated that attitude, that unsettledness, that refusal to be tied to any category, instead always disrupting oneself and disrupting the poochiarchy. Though Lina did not disagree with her own classification as female, she was convinced that sexism was, as Preciado put it, a “historical practice of differentiation and hierarchical taxonomy” that did not aptly describe the “genetic, morphological, and chromosomic” reality of the living, the fact that bodies were “irreducible to the binary system.”

Even if it wasn’t easy being female, Lina had no difficulty identifying as a bitch while at the same time recognizing that every dog was individual, no two dogs were exactly alike, and all living beings were in an ongoing process of transformation, even despite themselves.

But she pricked up her ears as she heard someone introduce the third presenter and note that she would be critiquing the trans-exclusionary writing and transphobic views of a renowned Colombian bitch, Canín.

Canín?

Had Canín turned TERF?

Lina seethed with sudden anguish.

A TERF from the outraged, unnuanced school of TERFism?

The two had met when they were both roaming around the United States, and Lina had admired Canín as a caninist without a pack, as a novelist, essayist, and combative public intellectual. Canín was well-read and articulate; she was witty and sarcastic and oh so persuasive. And though she hadn’t made any definitive statements about her canine identity, she had asserted that her “one true love” was her “wiener dog.”

Lina had believed Canín to be on her team; she never cared, as Canín’s long-fanged critics did, that the Colombian writer was not a mongrel, but a lapdog from a politically prominent Bogotá breed. Nobody chose their crate; what mattered was what you did once you left it. And Canín had stood up for human and animal rights in that country of hers so saturated with violence, and she had engaged in open dialogue before taking an unexpected turn and starting to snobbily proselytize about vocabulary and punctuation, handing out edits as a kind of muzzle and calling anyone who got in her way “assholes” and “losers” and worse.

What mosquito had bitten her over there in Colombia?, the mutt wondered and then immediately took it back because mosquitos were obviously blameless in such a development. Canín was the only one to blame for the fact that she’d gone off half-cocked—a bitch of a thing to do, Lina mused. Was it really true that she’d gone off half-cocked into TERFism, tracking the odoriferous spoor of writers such as Rowling and Ngozi and a considerable field of irate Spanish feminists whom Lina had once admired tremendously?

And if she was against gender transition, did that mean she was also against species transition? Had she come out against her previous puppy love? Did she now revile bitchdom? Had her carefree romance with her wiener dog been only a condescending joke? An affirmation of the asymmetry between pet and owner? Would she have dared to say that creatures like Lina were not mutts, let alone monkeys or mares or lionesses or lynxes or anything elseinthe vast menagerie of mammals?

Just thinking about it made Lina want to lift her hind leg and piss to one side like a dog. But no, she had no intention of even sitting down like a lady to do her business; it was not the time or the place for pissing. There was no way she was going to miss this talk. Lina settled down amid the zoomorphic herd in the room that was now dogged by a deathly silence.

She recognized her by her accent: the next cur to speak was a professor unquestionably from Buenos Aires, whose name was Suárez Tomé. She was a little scruffy but explained in clear, eloquent terms that the most radical opposition to gender transition had emerged from a segment of the feminist movement, the feminism of difference.

“Those thinkers,” the panelist explained, “laid out a sensible objection to the feminists of equality, arguing that, in their fight for parity of rights and obligations and the need for access to power through the vote, they failed to take into account the individual needs of the women of their time.

However,” she continued, “some feminists of difference went barking up the wrong tree and got tangled up in a biological determinism that exalted reproduction and maternity as a prerogative of females, and it was an even shorter step from there to essentialism. A freefall into the feminine ideal.”

It was enough to raise anyone’s hackles, but Lina told herself it might be a simple misunderstanding, a rectifiable stumble. Thought, like languages, like bodies and desire, was alive; thoughts could churn and jostle, move forward and backward, shift, twist, and radically transform. The feminists who were so fiercely opposed to transition today could change their minds, the mutt mused, forcing herself to optimism.

Yes, they could change their positions.

If only they could understand that nobody was solely female (or solely male), that the biological structures present were only one bit of information, and culturally constructed gender only another, and desire another; and that emotional affiliation and ideological positioning were still further bits of information in the complex process by which individuals form identities that could never be permanent anyway.

If only they could get it into their heads that transitioners were attempting not to erase women from the public agenda or to nullify their historical struggles but to be recognized as women themselves and join in as allies in womanist demands.

And if only they could stop imagining (there being no data to back up their fears) that trans women would use their penises to rape females in public bathrooms rather than to take a leak. Their penises! When so many trans women repudiated the pathetic bit of flesh dangling between their legs and longed be rid of it. And those who felt comfortable with their still erectile members had no desire to hurt anyone with them! It was abundantly clear that rapists used virility as a weapon of domination, not their sense of femininity.

If only they would realize that a rapist could invade a bathroom without any need to try to pass as a woman. There were never guards posted at the door to a women’s bathroom. And if there had been, the people they would have barred would most likely have been young tomboys who dress like males to avoid being sexualized and so-called butch lesbians who pass for men, rather than trans women.

And if only they could understand, those feminists, that the only way to protect the whiskers on incarcerated trans women’s muzzles was to send them to women’s prisons, because placement in men’s prisons was a death sentence.

Yes, of course they could understand all of that; they could stop their paranoid —or “conspiranoid thinking” as Suárez Tomé put it—.

Lina saw that the cur’s slideshow was now presenting statistics showing that biological women were not the only ones who experienced gender violence; that, in fact, trans women, as women by preference, and trans men, as defectors from womanhood, had it even worse. And what about those who had transitioned to another mammalian species? It wasn’t easy being trans on purity’s cobblestone streets; no wonder there was such a high suicide rate in the trans community, which had only recently begun to assert that it was not homosexual or bisexual, since this had nothing to do with whom a person desired but with who they were.

The mutt, who prior to her own transition had been uncertain about what position to take in the trans debate, had come to these conclusions by reading a great deal and deliberately pondering, as such a complex issue deserved. Carefully listening to the personal experiences of a variety of creatures had dispelled her earlier qualms, and she realized that the sole enemy for any nonnormative creature—another high-sounding concept, but there was no avoiding it—was and continued to be the patriarchy. She had heard one nonbinary stray dog with sturdy legs—the snow-white Butler—say as much: “We aren’t going to agree on everything, but we mustn’t forget who the enemy is.”

That line had become Lina’s motto: alliances did not preclude disagreement and difference, but they required upholding values of solidarity in political action. And she was never going to join the enemy if she could help it.

She was roused from her momentary distraction by the roar of the audience. The pack’s tongues seemed too long for their slavering snouts, and Suárez Tomé’s tone had grown frenzied:

“The trans-exclusionary discourse is neither radical nor subversive,” she said, quoting the Volcánicas collective.

Her fellow panelists, a panther and a many-spotted buffalo, nodded.

“Transexclusivism is right at home in homophobic, classist, racist, and penal contexts.”And she added that TERFs are preventing “the democratization of sexual rights,” which ought to be universal.

And then, having offered an analysis of the problem, Suárez Tomé now pointed to Canín as a standout example of Latin American transphobia.

She started by noting that it is contradictory to declare oneself a feminist and then undeclare it, and to use the “sociological category of gender” in one’s writing, only to later deny its existence. “In that way, she is much like other transphobes,” the panelist noted. “Feminists who once dismissed biology and promoted gender theory now believe only in the biological category of sex, arguing for the ‘ultimate truth’ of the vulva, vagina, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, and—let’s not forget—hormones. As if womanhood could be reduced to that.”

“What difference does it make if a set of genitals is made of flesh or constructed on an operating table?”

a voice muttered, to which another chimed in,

“What difference does it make to Canín? Why does she give a shit about my trunk!” “My hooves!” “My hump!” “My teats!” other voices thrummed. Others shushed them.

They plunged into an agitated murmuring and Suárez Tomé took the opportunity to toss the crowd another argument, which landed like a pitchforkful of fodder:

“In the name of that absolute biological truth, that truth that excludes all others, Canín also denies the existence of pregnant men. As Canín sees it, gestating individuals are still women.”

The audience howled.

“And Canín,” Suárez Tomé continued, “has even accused the trans community of buying identities (and eggs! and sperm! and wombs!) on a capitalistic whim. That accusation is yet another staple of the trans-exclusionary songbook as well as other songbooks.”

It was true—all critical analysis seemed to point to capitalism as the culprit. Only other people’s capitalism, because the most outraged TERFs included liberal feminists who themselves bought eggs, sperm, wombs. And name-brand cosmetics and jewelry, just as Canín herself was always impeccably made up. And designer clothing that was supposed to highlight true womanhood.

And, same as trans women, many transphobes got plastic surgery and botox so they could look in the mirror and see themselves there. And they took hormones that they argued were legitimate because they were meant to combat infertility or alleviate the horrors of menopause.

“All of this is presented as common sense, but it is based on distortions and falsehoods, and, worse still, is completely lacking in critical depth. These arguments do not stand up to scrutiny,” the presenter asserted, and her fellow panelists again nodded. Rather than giving a soliloquy, Suárez Tomé appeared to be in conversation with the lithe panther and the buffalo and with every creature in the room and with the eager mutt. She was appealing to the audience, determined to present reasons for deliberation.

A rhinoceros jumped in to argue that “if some had vulvas, vaginas, uteruses, fallopian tubes, and ovaries, and others penises and testicles and whatever, what biological difference was there between a lion and a bear, a cow and a cat, a human and a mouse, a dog and a rabbit? Every difference and none at all! But they no doubt went by other names!”

And though the statement could have been clearer, the herd responded with an enthusiastic cheer.

“Set against the absolute truth of biology, everything else looks like a costume, like a trivial artifice, mere fashion. Do recall,” the presenter harangued, now on a pedagogical tear, “that a well-known thirteenth-century Spanish maxim claimed that a monkey dressed in silk remains a monkey all the same, suggesting that a monkey’s nature cannot be concealed beneath a gown or, for instance, a wig. That, more or less, is what Canín is arguing.”

“Slanderous bitch!”

one yowled, bristling like a cat, and from a few rows back the zebra piped up, saying,

“She even called us fascists!”

“Fascists?” a rather scrawny panda exclaimed.

“Sure did!” a stripey creature certified,

but the elephant interceded: Canín had apologized, saying that she had meant to say “fanatics.”

“What a way to fix it!” several voices chorused in unison, and then tripped over one another adding on to everybody else’s points:

“We haven’t taken anything away from her!”

“Why does she ridicule our need for recognition?”

“Why does she treat us like the enemy?” a llama spat.

“Why does she spend her time casting doubt on us when there’s so much violence to denounce, so many adversaries to combat, so much catastrophe deserving of attention?”

“Doesn’t she get that our lives are on the line?” one voice amid others implored.

“Let’s throw her to the dogs!” the mandrill exclaimed furiously while a giraffe, silenced by her lack of vocal cords, seconded the motion by sticking out her very long tongue and cleaning her ears.

“We should cancel her!”

The cur applauded these fierce bellows with an understated gesture. Her voice boomed into the microphone.

“Our strategy should not be insults or cancelation.”

Lina heard in that mandate more a plea than a recommendation.

“The prejudices of this woman and an entire school of radical feminism,” she added, “must be combated with solid arguments that demonstrate where the claims of TERFism fall apart...” She coughed a little to clear her throat and then continued with a slogan. “Cancelation is tricky, but refutation is imperative... We live in society; one-way conversations serve no political purpose.”

The mutt felt like standing up and clapping.