Orlando, my political biography attempts to write a new perspective on being trans as a sort of universal being. The film starts with the question: “where is Orlando,” and the answer is that they are me. That they are Preciado. That I don’t wake up as Orlando, but that I am Orlando since the very building. Yes i am Orlando. I am she, “for there could be no doubt of [her] sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it.” Paul B. Preciado shapes this film as a letter to Virginia, as a response to the book, “before we are born and, of course, ends long after we die.” Who was she? Was she another Orlando? He wants to show her all [his] metamorphoses and crash tests.” Maybe I also want to do that. As a trans person, I have the need to forever change. Frank O’Hara also wanted that:

I wake up and become something new. I go back to my dreams and I become something new. I wake up. There could’ve been no doubt that I was boy, I didn’t doubt it, yet here I am. I am Niks. A non-binary “devojčurak”, as I described myself to my mum. There is no doubt, but I am Orlando. “It’s just a person who unfolds their life.” So it goes, I am changing. I am becoming Orlando, I was always Orlando. I had no idea I would ever become Orlando, but I’m letting myself change.

To give a warning, this is not just an essay. It’s a call to action, a collection of notes about my transition, memories, quotes, and a letter to another Orlando, if they decide to read it. I wanted to let the world know that “I’m the monster who speaks.” I am the political agent, I am the being you are afraid of, since my body isn’t just mine. Others make choices about what I can be, what I should be. They are the psychiatrists who attempt to diagnose me. They are the legal system which doesn’t allow me to become a complete version of myself. They are the language which tells me that I don’t exist. In the legal sense, I am still the old version of myself, locked in 2021 when I changed my name with the goal to stop others from seeing through me. I am the set of codes which limit my existence.

No, this isn’t just an essay. I’ve had enough of essays which talk about trans people as if we were medical cases, essays which reduce our existence, essays which operate on our brains, in order to create their narratives of our lives. I think that Preciado is also sick of that psychoanalytical lens. In his book ““Can the monster speak?,” he talks about the freedom that was stolen from us, about the stereotypes which are placed upon us, about the colonial remains of psychoanalysis left behind in the 20th century with Lacan and Freud, who built a society of control. I can feel his rage.

The question of freedom is a throughline in the film. What do it mean to be free, when I know that my basic human right to freedom will soon be erased? It’s enough to cross the border as a trans person, to go into a public toilet without the fear that I won’t be able to do that soon enough, to go to the doctor without a doubt that I’ll be discriminated, to cross the street late at night. All of that points to systemic issues of a world which actively refuses to cope with its very present, let alone its past.

Recently I finished writing a book about the murders of trans people in the period of TDOR 2024. When I tell others that I’m writing a book, there’s an expectation that it’ll be a text about freedom, that it will have a happy ending, that it will be something fun; and then when I explain the topic, they are surprised, worried and sad. Yes, I am also worried. I am worried while I read about minors, about trans women, about the many trans POC, about the many lawless murders. I am worried that this is a routine, that it is the status quo.

Maybe that common experience of violence points to the synonyms which make up our past. Maybe the fact that we’re not allowed to be alone can help us to find a common hope and to write common stories. Not a single Orlando was alone. We live in a collective history, in a collective being.

The common experience of trans people is the conversation with a psychiatrist, their look which always cuts through our souls. “Look at your Orlandos… They didn’t live as aristocrats or poets. They were reduced to being patients of psychiatry.” I was terrified of my first psychiatrist. Three years of my life, spent in excruciating waiting. Three years, wasted. Don’t think that I was a victim. No, I had to continue waiting for that one night in which I’d change. I had prepare myself for two weeks for every single session. I was afraid of her, because she was the confrontation with the systemic problems of a life while trans. I remember that I once wrote that to be a trans person means to wait. That process describes our very existence. Yes, it is a process. The questions which describe a label. “You are a man. No, you are a woman. No, you’re something else. Yet no, you’re just just one of those two. You can’t be anything else. I don’t understand.” That obsession with labeling identities. I am me. I am Orlando. Like a horror film. I awake, yet she forces me to sleep. I don’t know what is expected from me. I expected changes. Rapid changes. And then, when I was supposed to get them, she pulled the rug out from under me. She quit and then charged me 10000RSD per session, in a country where trans people often make minimum wage. I was able to survive that, but I didn’t want to. I switched to a different psychiatrist, she understood me.

Later on the film asks the question: “how to construct an Orlandoesque life, a life of a gender poet in the midst of a binary and normative society? I agree with you, fiction is not opposed to truth, and every individual life is a collective history.” A binary choice was forced upon me, an imperialist idea forced upon all other peoples, an idea which remained present after the destruction of all their ideals. We didn’t even know that we could be something else. Traditions, religions, lives, histories, freedoms. All of that was taken from us.

Branding trans people as trans points to an Othering. As Preciado later says, “Either everyone has an identity. Or there is no identity. We all occupy a distinct place in a complex network of power relations. To be branded with an identity means simply that one does not have the power to designate one’s identity as universal.” This idea, that an an identity which defines us was also forced upon us, without the ability to choose how we actually want to present ourselves. Without those definitions, we lose our meaning to the rest of the world, we become unexplainable, which might even be a good thing. I don’t want to always have to explain and/or simplify myself to cis people. “I’m no longer a boy. I’m not a woman yet. I’m not the person I want to be yet. But the words to describe the gender of the person I want to be don’t exist. So, they have to be invented. So, you have to be poetic. We are poets.”

It’s very easy to forget that systems of oppression aren’t set in stone, but that they can be destroyed, and that we can create new, more just ways of acceptance and existence. That was never, and will never be easy, but it is extremely possible, and something which is becoming expected. It’s very easy to notice the dissatisfaction with the current systems, even in cishet white people, who are tired of the repression forced upon us, which is present in their lives too. It’s very easy to realize that this isn’t working, that this needs to be destroyed, so that we can build new systems which aren’t based on a history of violence and discrimination, and that point to a willingness to exist, a rage which fascism won’t be able to prevent. “We never operate on individual bodies. We operate on the political history. It is the regime of sexual difference we have to operate on. There are so many historical discourses on which we must intervene.” When we break down the systems of gendered oppression, we get the chance to create something new.

A new epistemology is required not only in science, but in every institution so that we can gain equal rights for all minorities. Intersectionality is the key fight for building a more radical way of existence, which recognizes differences, but also a collective battle which would allow us to reformulate the current systems and to build a more just society. We need to create a future for every trans child which goes through the constant fascist attempts to remove their rights. I remember Nex Benedict, a non-binary child who was murdered last year because of their identity. They aren’t the only example of this wave of hate which is placed upon our community. This raises a question: who is the next Orlando to disappear?

These changes won’t happen overnight. An Orlando doesn’t change overnight, as shown in the book. Being trans is a process, a verb, a gerund. “Life is not at all like a biography. It’s not a series of episodes or sentimental adventures or descriptive scenes or even the servitude of daily existence. But it consists in the metamorphosis of oneself, letting oneself be transformed by time, becoming not only other, but others.” By giving time the ability to shape us, we become something new, something more like ourselves. I was becoming like other people, I was becoming shaped, out of my control, yet always present, maybe too present.

Being trans is freeing, to leave the cage of our bodies means to dig ourselves out. I am reminded of a scene from the film I saw the TV glow. After the everyday horror of existing as a trans person who doesn’t know they’re trans, the main character begins to dig themself out, to look for the freedom we’re all chasing after. They scream, beg for the help which is missing from them. Earlier in the film, their film says that “time wasn't right. It was moving too fast. And then I was 19. and then I was 20. I felt like one of those dolls asleep in the supermarket. Stuffed. And then I was 21. Like chapters skipped over on a DVD. I told myself, ‘this isn't normal. This isn't normal. This isn't how life is supposed to feel.’” (I saw the TV glow) The process of self-discovery is painful, and it takes a lot of time, but it is so worth it. I could’ve lived a thousand lives, and I would still be Niks. Jane Schoenbrun, the director of that film, once said something which still resonates with me.

At the end of Preciado’s film, we can see a call for a reform of the way through which we look at the trans experience. “It is for the right to edit our lives that we are still fighting today… Your Orlandos are still there. Now, for the first time, they start to speak up and to exist by themselves. To choose their name and to choose their own life. The world to come belongs to the new Orlandos. They will edit the film of History. It is for them that you wrote your book, even without knowing it, and that I made this film.” This conclusion of the letter to Virginia Woolf reminds us to edit our own stories and to save our futures.

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