Critical Self-Reflection
Halfway through 2025, Maria Clara Araújo dos Passos’s book, to me, reads like a letter from an empowered democratic consciousness, saying, ‘I am still alive.’ I read it as a rallying cry for the organization of travestis and trans, transgender, and transsexual people. The conceptual critique at the heart of Araújo dos Passos’s project is classic: rights should be for everybody—and every body, in particular. If we are not considered legal subjects, despite our cooperation with the rule of law, we ought to raise awareness and address each other and state authorities about existing shortcomings, so as to expand the range of subjects who bear rights to those who have hitherto been excluded.
The underlying conceptual problem, as Araújo dos Passos presents it, is ‘a modern conception that separates mind and body’.[1] This overarching separation of a mindless body from a disembodied mind, degrades the former and elevates the latter, especially regarding citizenship and the subject of rights.[2] In this sense, political struggles are also philosophical struggles: oppression is often the oppression of matter. And those reduced to their physicality, to their matter, are most oppressed. Classically, trans and non-binary people, Black and Brown people, people of colour, and women have been said to be driven by their bodies, their desires, and their supposedly inferior physicality. They are cast as stupid, lascivious, inferior, unhinged by nature, meaning, by matter. Araújo dos Passos rightfully argues that the emancipation of travestis and trans people must be grounded in the embodied practices of the people to be emancipated[3]—emancipation on high heels[4], for example. In this context, Araújo dos Passos also critically discusses the terminological turn from ‘travesti’ towards ‘transsexual’, ‘transgender’, and ‘trans’, which she describes as ‘sanitization’—a cleansing of dirty, lascivious, corporeal imaginations in favour of an imported, less offensive term that promises political inclusion on the heels of social respectability.
How can this be achieved? ‘Social transformation … is only possible when critical self-recognition is developed.’[5] The goal of the pedagogy presented here is a critical knowing of the self (self-recognition) in a double sense: we must recognize ourselves both as bearers of individual rights and as manifestations of a group aiming at legislative change.[6] I agree: some groups must be describable as socially, politically, and/or culturally differentiated from other groups, and members of that group must appropriate and perform that difference in order to exert political agency as a group.[7] In the classic example, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak reconstructs it,[8] the European working classes were socially, culturally, and politically distinct from their respective ruling classes. They lived in certain parts of the city, they had their own patterns and routines regarding food, music, and language. In short, they could be described as a class. Yet, mere describability does not make a political actor. A major task of political parties, then and now, was and is to raise awareness of the political agency that a group of people can exert when they act together—and then act together.[9] In order to raise this awareness—classically called ‘class consciousness’—presenting a shared history is key: be it the history of class struggle, of colonization, of gender oppression, or of travesti organizing. It allows for a mediation between individual suffering and collective struggle. All of a sudden, it is not just, ‘I want to live.’ It is not merely, ‘Land back!’ It becomes ‘I oppose the history of colonial expropriation and oppression. This is unjust. I demand justice—not just for myself, but for everybody!’ And all of a sudden, it is not one against all, but us together against injustice.[10]
In the mostly European and US contexts I can observe, gender-diverse people are often politically disenfranchised, in that they do not conceive of themselves as political subjects to begin with. They do not contact their political representatives. They rarely file legal actions in order to claim their rights. Nor do they know about their rights to begin with. The reasons include poverty, social exclusions, and ever-looming depression. Empowering trans people to speak for themselves, develop critical self-recognition, and effect changes that actually benefit them seems like the right thing to do. Or does it?
Countering a common critique, Araújo dos Passos argues that ‘the state … [is not] an evil sphere’.[11] Underestimating our capacities over against the state cannot be a good strategy if we want to bring about real change, she argues. Also, a movement grows through its encounters with obstacles. I agree. Yet, in the US-American and European political and activist circles that I am a part of, there is another side to this argument: depression, it seems to me, is really the big enemy of political organizing. It yields a defeatist form of ‘resistance’ that serves the interests of the powers they allegedly oppose. It says: “We cannot change anything anyway.” It clothes depression in sparkly radical theory attire and ultimately serves to disempower: ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ (Audre Lorde). To get rid of oppression, we need a radical new beginning. In its depressive variant, however, this ultimately serves the interests it supposedly seeks to oppose and contributes to our disempowerment. The result is a retreat into consumption, partying, and social media. In this context, then, critical self-reflection as political empowerment is a fair aim for a political project: in order to make anything better for ourselves, we must develop a political consciousness that enables us to speak as members of a group (for example, as travestis, trans people, etc.) to the relevant authorities (and not just to our friends and/or on social media). The pragmatics of such a development will make a pedagogy. Such is the democratic ideal: people make their demands heard and will be recognized. Compromises are often necessary. But overall, things will get better…[12]
Critique and Disinformation
Whoever says ‘I am still alive’ may drop dead the next minute. And is that not the case here? Trans and travesti politics lives with the grave difficulty of being in a minority position: democratic systems are built on majority votes and will, therefore, try to appeal to majorities. When minority parties receive governmental responsibility, they can do so only as junior partners, making it difficult for them to advance their causes. There are, of course, minority governments, such as tyrannies or monarchies or oligarchies, where a small group or single person rules over everybody else. But these people traditionally do not have the interests of trans and travesti people in mind (though you are, of course, free to become the counter-example). How, then, can minority parties score political wins?
If we want to achieve legal progress through majority agreement, we must convince the majority either through critique or through empathy. I will now first discuss empathy. Whatever empowerment can be achieved in this way must happen conditionally. Germany’s Self-Determination Act (Selbstbestimmungsgesetz, SBGG)[13], which regulates changes of legal names and genders, is a case in point: although NGOs strongly opposed the status quo verbally, there were no major demonstrations or political actors on the ground and no other leverage to use. Never mind how convincing, these attempts remained mere appeals to empathy and the ‘critiques’ were merely proof of bourgeois credibility. Unfortunately, the matter became a strategic issue in much larger contexts, the details of which have no place here.
Let it be said that under the 2024 SBGG, trans women can be drafted into the military (and retroactively, up to two months before a case of defence), trans refugees are often suspected of fraudulent behaviour whenever they desire to use the SBGG, and trans women can, under no circumstances, become mothers.[14] Lesson learned: empathy is not enough.
How about critique then? Critique, really, is a political practice that relies on the connection between power and knowledge. It assumes that if people knew better, they would change their behaviours. If politicians or judges had an adequate understanding of the real-life situation of travestis and trans and non-binary people, for example, they would change their policies or make an appropriate legal judgement—or at least they would be made to do so by articulate and cunning trans or travesti politicians or activists.[15] For trans issues, this approach has worked especially well in court, where knowledge and power seem to be more closely aligned than elsewhere. But is this still the case?
One way to disable critique is to base power not on knowledge but, for example, on power. We call this ‘tyranny’: ‘We do this because I say so.’ Another way is to commodify thoughts: ‘This is my opinion, which I understand to be my private property. I don’t owe anybody an explanation or justification. These are just my thoughts. I hate you. Goodbye.’ We call this ‘hypercapitalism’. A related strategy is to provide so much disinformation that ‘knowledge’ becomes the private property of the highest bidder or the most dedicated liar—and it is just their opinion, after all. This is where freedom of speech becomes toxic. It is, however, the direction that right-wing politics has taken over the past few years. They just lie and lie and lie, always aiming for effectiveness of speech, but are not concerned about its truthfulness. They appeal to what people think they already know—and, here, the right-wing audience is easier to handle than the left-wing audience, simply because right-wingers often build their belief systems on somewhat arbitrary virtues, convictions, or preferences, while left-wingers often insist on the argument, rationalizability, or a sense of justice that can transcend each and every particular order, be it legal, moral, or conceptual.
I take it that, for Araújo dos Passos, becoming a citizen in the full sense means becoming a subject of critical self-recognition. We could also say, through Baruch Spinoza, ‘Humans aren’t born, but rather become civil’. (Homines enim civiles non nascuntur, sed fiunt.)[16] But this requires a critical infrastructure, institutions where we can learn, flourish, experience joy, and rest.[17] But what do we do when critique as a social institution is under attack?
This is currently the case. ‘In our time, the great task … is to find an escape from politics in all its forms’—and that escape is technology, says Peter Thiel in ‘The Education of a Libertarian’ (2009).[18] Since then, Thiel has become a major donor of far-right politicians and libertarian players in tech. Now in 2025, his threat has become reality: large-scale disinformation campaigns from various sides (the US, Russia, the Vatican) exploit social divisions to the point where any productive conversation online has become increasingly impossible—effectively silencing many face-to-face debates.[19] This effect has increasingly taken over political discourse as a whole: political groups that hardly understand each other, let alone converse with each other, and an ever-increasing dominance of the most absurd political stances on all sides. The employment, especially, of troll factories, bots, and AI-generated content online threatens not only to petrify democratic processes but also to incapacitate any creative or imaginative force that could point beyond it. What we are witnessing is a re-invention of the political tyrant, who decides everything single-handedly, accompanied by a proliferation of war and economic turbulence. In short, Thiel and his technocrats are having their way: politics is replaced by its simulation, now called ‘social media’. And, as a result, when you read this, real politics (organizing, parliamentary processes, divisions of power on a state level, public debate with a political outcome), not to mention democracy itself, may not even be alive anymore.
Euphoria
Disinformation usually plays on an alleged pre-understanding (prejudice), a feeling of security in one’s unexamined comprehension. People believe they already know what a man is, what a woman is, how white people differ from Black people, and why this group is better than the other one. An update of democracy that seeks to confront this challenge must appeal to affects and emotions more powerful than the comfort of ‘we already know’.
Araújo, however, recommends critical self recognition. Such critical self-recognition requires infrastructures that enable critique, instead of silencing it.[20] Now, critique is not everyone’s darling, as it often works by making people feel guilty when they realize they are wrong. But people are also annoyed by being made to feel bad—and, hence, they resist the critique. Could there be another affect of critique? Another critical infrastructure that enables that affect to mobilize majorities? One grounded in trans or travesti corporeality?
Yes.
For the longest time, transness had been understood through dysphoria: a fear of or uneasiness with one’s own body or social position. Yet, in the past few years, more and more travestis and trans and non-binary people have claimed that what drives them is rather a certain euphoria, a joy or (non-normative) healthiness experienced through a certain gender performance. For example, since my transition, I have come to realize that my flirting skills just work best in a lesbian setting. I have no idea how to flirt differently.[21] Is gender euphoria trans-specific? I do not think so. Cis people can experience gender euphoria as well. Think of all the gym bros who post half-naked images of their muscle-packed bodies on social media or the cis femmes immersing themselves in shoes and makeup techniques. These, I claim, are signs of cis gender euphoria. And that’s a good thing!
Here, then, is our new critical infrastructure: let us develop a state that is organized around euphoria, rather than today’s constitutional states that centre on contractuality and the dynamic of submission/protection that comes with it. I propose that such a shift could combat the AI order of disinformation and power without knowledge. For, in fact, the truth never convinces simply because it is true. It always convinces because it feels good (or at least feels better than something else). It may relieve the guilt of being wrong. It may grant a sense of power and superiority. Or (the best kind) it may enable that particular feeling of joy or cheerfulness that can take hold of humans upon experiencing a genuine insight (just like you, maybe, right now). That latter kind is what we are aiming for.
For reasons I cannot explain here (but will in forthcoming publications),[22] euphoria is stronger than all other emotions. To substantiate Araújo dos Passos’s critical self-recognition, I suggest a euphoric infrastructure, euphoric critique, and euphoric democracy. A state that is not organized around protection (nor the submission and punishment and forsakenness that come with it) and a critique that is not grounded in guilt. Imagine a judge, plaintiff, and defendant singing along as they solve a case. Imagine government and opposition happily smiling—never mind whose proposal carried the day. Imagine a state that consistently attempts to support and enable, in every sphere, the euphoria of its citizens: the joy of being alive, the joy of being in community, of having insights so thrilling you jump out of the bathtub and run around naked like Archimedes upon that famous insight, shouting: EUREKA!
This text was first published in the publication Pedagogies of Travesti Liberation (Berlin: HKW & Archive Books, 2025), 177–186. A German edition is also available.
[1] Maria Clara Araújo dos Passos, Pedagogies of Travesti Liberation (Berlin: HKW and Archive Books, 2025), 155, see also 77, 82, 110, 113.
[2] Araújo dos Passos, Pedagogies, 89, 100ff.
[3] Araújo dos Passos, Pedagogies, 68.
[4] Araújo dos Passos, Pedagogies, 151.
[5] Araújo dos Passos, Pedagogies, 90, see also 78, 103, 108.
[6] Araújo dos Passos, Pedagogies, 67, 102, 112f.
[7] Araújo dos Passos, Pedagogies, 63, 69, 102.
[8] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 260.
[9] Araújo dos Passos, Pedagogies of Travesti Liberation, 63, 79.
[10] For some groups, this transition from shared behaviours between individuals to collective political activity (politically and epistemologically) is blocked. For Spivak, this is the characteristic of ‘subalternity’. And the reason why subalterns cannot ‘speak’ is precisely because they cannot appropriate their position as political subjectivity (for reasons of political ideology, but also because of their relationship to intellectuals and so-called ‘native informants’). See Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 270–273, as well as 102 and 196. For more on subalternity, see in particular: Namita Goswani, Subjects That Matter: Philosophy, Feminism, and Postcolonial Theory (New York: SUNY Press, 2019). For a trans-specific example reflecting on the European context, see Luce deLire, ‘Can the Transsexual Speak?’, philoSOPHIA: Journal of Transcontinental Feminism, Special Issue ‘Intersectionality Today’ (2023), 13.
[11] Araújo dos Passos, Pedagogies of Travesti Liberation, 120.
[12] See Axel Honneth, Das Recht der Freiheit: Grundriß einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011).
[13] Act on Self-Determination With Regard to Gender Markers (Gesetz über die Selbstbestimmung in Bezug auf den Geschlechtseintrag – SBGG), Federal Republic of Germany (2024), www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_sbgg/index.html.
[14] See Juliana Franke and Luce deLire, ‘Selbstbestimmungsgesetz: Zeichen von Disziplinierung und Privatisierung’, Neues Deutschland (2 November 2024), https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/1186425.bundesregierung-selbstbestimmungsgesetz-zeichen-von-disziplin-und-privatisierung.html.
[15] However, if we look at the statistics, it becomes clear that this strategy does not work—unless there is a fairly close emotional relationship. See Sarah Stein Lubrano, Don’t talk about politics: How to change 21st-century minds (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025).
[16] Baruch Spinoza, Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 2, edited by E. Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
[17] Araújo dos Passos, Pedagogies of Travesti Liberation, 19, 45, 75f, 144.
[18] Peter Thiel, ‘The Education of a Libertarian’, Cato Unbound (13 April 2009), https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/.
[19] For an overview of disinformation in the EU, see EU DisinfoLab, The disinformation landscape across Europe (15 January 2025), https://www.disinfo.eu/publications/disinformation-landscapes-in-european-countries/. For a case study regarding trans* rights, including the role of the Vatican, see Sebastian Rowlands, Landscape analysis: What we know on anti-gender movement measures and actors targeting trans people across Europe and Central Asia, Transgender Europe (TGEU) 2023, https://www.tgeu.org/files/uploads/2024/08/TGEU-AGM-landscape-analysis_updated.pdf.
[20] Araújo dos Passos, Pedagogies of Travesti Liberation, 102, 144f, 147.
[21] For more thoughts about flirting, see Luce deLire, ‘Lessons in love I: On revolutionary flirting,’ Stillpoint Magazine, 2021, https://stillpointmag.org/articles/lessons-in-love-i-on-revolutionary-flirting/.
[22] Luce deLire, ‘EUPHORIA: A treatise against capitalism’s techno-tyrants (notably THE BABY) and for revolutionary Trans Lesbian hospitality’ (forthcoming). Also in the last chapter of Luce deLire, Spinoza on Sex, Gender and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026, forthcoming).