4. Two Kinds of People: Three Kinds of People

Miller’s theory of the queerness of Austen’s Style helps us catch a glimmering that begins to tease out the nonbinary and trans possibilities thrumming like an unseen but vital pulse under the skin of Austen’s work. Miller introduces his lectures by connecting the aesthetic to the subjective for young readers of Austen: “what Austen’s writing channeled for us was the . . . appeal of no longer being” a person.1 Here he speaks of the magnificent impersonality of her Style that cheers readers that they might be depersonalized too, but he also follows the engendering effect her work’s gendered affects bestow on her readers. On the difference between girl and boy readers of Austen, Miller notes how often boys are made to feel shame for this indulgent fantasia with woman’s world, whereas for girls reading Austen, it confers womanhood: “For one thing, what people said about Jane Austen could only enhance a girl’s right relation to the sex system and to the culture it governed; she had done what a female not only would, but ought. . . . But best of all, if Austen meant Woman, then perhaps in turn Woman might mean Austen.”2 On this reading, reading Austen is to read Woman—what it means to be a woman, think like a woman, and speak like a woman. Austen’s idiolect, apparently so womanly in its persuasions, socio-ontologically bespeaks Woman itself except where, as Miller shows in his dynamic and dazzling close reading of Robert Ferrars’s minute inspection of toothpick cases, we find Ferrars’s effeminacy standing in for a closeted queerness right out, as it were, in the open in Austen’s novels. For boy readers, we find there are “two male readers,” one happily “being the woman she [Austen] was,” while the other is “performing” being her. For all of this womanliness and queerness, though, “the whole elaborate and brutal game I have been describing, in which Austen style may be collapsed into Woman and Woman into (male) Homosexual—or in which Austen Style, so as not to be collapsed into Woman, is collapsed into Homosexual directly—is not just played ‘around’ Jane Austen.”3 And the why of the “why this game” Austen’s game, does not encircle Austen, is, as we have already seen, because Austen’s world wants to have no room for Austen, for the liberated, single woman artist.

There is, of course, rarely a first-person singular in Austen, but Miller finds in her Style a finality of impersonality that rejects even the Woman and the Homosexual, arguing, “Austen Style is already decidedly neuter, as though it were on an exemption from ‘sex’—in the old-fashioned sense . . . of both gender and sexuality—that this impersonality is most crucially founded, developed, secured.”4 He then compares “the narrative voice” in a passage on the picaresque in Northanger Abbey (1817) and Austen’s “Lady” signature on the frontispiece of her novels to “a slightly bungled sex-change operation that leaves a tiny reminder of the gender it has altered (say, Hedwig’s ‘angry inch’)” and “blows its neutrality, if only just a little bit.”5 Austen Style, that supposedly impersonal and neutral voice, betrays a, shall we say, gender transition both to and away from Woman and to and away from the male Homosexual. We can detect, then, in the neutrality of Austen Style that Miller traces, already a writing resistant to an incumbent sociologic of sex and gender. The question that arises, and which Miller leaves unanswered, may be, where, if anywhere, is this transition’s final destination? Is a question about destinationality even the, or a necessary, question? Maybe, as freindship’s freedom alleges, all that matters is the freedom to run mad?

Could it be, dare we say, that the little bit of Austen Style that peeks out as an inch of penis leftover—“my sex change operation got botched,” Hedwig belts in the song “The Origin of Love” Miller alludes to—confronts us with the possibility that Austen Style, in its transition away from neutrality, is itself transgender or nonbinary?6

Miller’s allusion to this film interests in that it recalls another important, but often overlooked, Romantic-era appropriation of a text on gender and sexuality. The centerpiece referent in the film’s centerpiece song, “The Origin of Love,” is Aristophanes’s speech in Plato’s Symposium that articulates a theory of the origin of gender, sexuality, and sex in terms of trans, nonbinary, intersex, and cisgender, as well as hetero- and homosexuality, a text that Austen’s contemporary, Percy Bysshe Shelley, of course translated around 1818, although it is exceedingly unlikely that Austen would have had knowledge of Plato’s text, and none at all of Shelley’s translation, which remained unpublished in the period, and in any event postdated Austen’s death. Be that as it may, Shelley’s Symposium supplies us with a Romantic-period, late Regency–era take on gender, sexuality, and sex that wildly detours from normative beliefs of the time and that, I hope to show, Austen would, and does, readily endorse.

On Aristophanes’s account, to follow Shelley’s translation, “human beings were formerly not divided into two sexes, male and female; there was also a third, common to both the others, the name of which remains, though the sex itself has disappeared. The androgynous sex, both in appearance and name, was common to both the male and female.”7 Biologically speaking, origin-ally, different sexes did not exist, only (as the song puts it) “the children of the earth, and the moon, and the sun.” In this etiology, the androgyne, the child of the moon, has a penis and a vagina before an enraged, jealous, and implacable Zeus divides the being, thus creating a male and a female, a two, who spend their lives trying to find each other and join back together as their one former whole. Well, the most obvious of cisheteronormative sexualities and genders are not originary but a consequence of an induced injury that must be redressed through physical recombination. An intersex person (but, again, in this myth, the person was not intersex, because there was no gender or material sex as such) is split into both male and female genders and in the process creates gender, sexuality, and sex (the latter in the act-of sense), none of which previously existed.

Ironically, though, if we read through the logic of this myth to its terminus ad quem, when these male and female beings have sex—that is, rejoin, and in so doing thus reblur gender and sex, which was already blurrily blurred—certain wandering, lovelorn males and females would, in various couplings, perforce, reconnect, and, in doing so, re-abolish gender and sexuality altogether because sex and gender only exist as a result of this analeptic and proleptic sundering unsuturing. Simultaneously, sex would disappear because it would now be unnecessary as its purpose, re-merging, is now rendered null. A two, in all cases, becomes one in this reverse sutured androgyne syzygy of the moon, and the earth, and the stars that is not a marriage, the latter being a kind of union that, according to, say, Austen’s Emma, serves only to preserve the two in the guise of becoming one. The children of the moon, the man and woman, undergo a kind of transgender process to become pregender, before cisheteronormativity altogether, which would also be to say that there is no stable preoriginary or originary cisgender but rather only (non)preoriginary, transformable pre- and nongender fluidities, which are not genders at all. On this mythological model, what we now call nonbinary embodiment is prior and critical to the formation of societal compulsory cisgender and also cisheterosexuality—but only in the paradoxical and counterintuitive sense that there is not, a priori, gender or sexuality of any sort except transgender and nonbinary, which is not, if we follow this hugger-mugger logic, nonbinary!

Let’s fast-forward this Aristophanian mixtape to now. When Judith Butler rejected the views of TERFs, they were chastised by those same so-called gender-critical feminists in a series of tweets excoriating them, suggesting that they, of all people!, need to learn about what gender “is.” In response to such ultracrepidarian piffle, Sara Ahmed writes, that, well, “perhaps we do need to laugh,” because the claims of these gender-critical feminists are laughable in how sublimely laughable their ridiculousness is.8 And it would be easy to laugh, as the other drinkers at Plato’s symposium do, at Aristophanes’s anacreontic speech. But what if we consider Aristophanes’s speech in the manner Ahmed suggests, as a kind of aperçu, a cachinnating response, like Austen’s fiction, to gender-critical feminist ideology that insists on biological essentialism, that there is a natural, absolute sex-gender binary wherein penises and vaginas determine who is who—in short, that there are two, and only two, kinds of people?

Let us look closer at Aristophanes’s calculating mathematics that prove out as stochastic, no kind of mathematics whatsoever, Lady Satan’s kind of love and freindship. As Aristophanes tells the tale, in the beginning, there are three sets of people: one, two men glued up back to back; one, two women glued up back to back; and one, a man and a woman glued up back to back. Having been halved, this creates sexual acts since people spend their lives trying to find their other half through physical sexual reunification—a longing for this moon–sun–earth syzygy. It perforce, as we’ve said, creates various kinds of genders and sexual identities: men, women, trans, genderqueer, straight, gay, the sky’s the limit—or hell is the limit, if we follow Lady Satan. In Aristophanes’s origin myth, once people are split into two bodies, the three kinds of people we began with become two kinds of people in terms of gender because those (non)nonbinary beings suddenly become binaristic: a man and a woman, even as multiple sexes, sex acts, and sexualities begin to proliferate. To be is two be. And yet if we follow Aristophanes, in a heterosexual or homosexual sex encounter, you are looking for yourself in the very person you are having sex with! This comports with what Grace Lavery says about transgender: you can both desire a person as an object of pleasure and desire to be that object.9 At the same time, this sexual desire of, for, a person, as Aristophanes says, can never satiate itself because the object of its desire is returning to a desired wholeness that is impossible! For Aristophanes, this impossibility exposes the illusion of binary gender and sexual identity: it never was, and is not, real.

This fictional, all too-supposedly-true nature of gender and sexuality is what Aristophanes captures so well. That is, the supposedly binaristic nature that TERFs idolize is also nonbinary in that heteronormative people are still, by nature, nonbinary and looking to return to that state, as we can see because they want to merge with their other half! This is to say that when two of any of these people find each other, they would become one. On this logic, it is also to say that the two kinds of people are one kind of nonbinary person. In fact, we can say that for Aristophanes—originally—there are three kinds of people, but even when they become two kinds of people (two kinds of genders, two kinds of sexual identities, two kinds of sexual acts) who want to be one kind of person, there remain . . . three kinds of people, because everyone is naturally looking to go back to being two men glued up back to back, two women glued up back to back, or a man and a women glued up back to back. That one kind of person we long to be is . . . three kinds of people! We might even also think of compulsorily cisheterosexuality as nonbinary in that people are trying to transition from their current cisgender condition to the gender they actually were and desire to be, beyond all additive logic. Everything originates with (non)nonbinary and remains (non)nonbinary. What a great fiction and fact! How true it is in Aristophanes’s paradoxes and parallax view!

What is more, Aristophanes’s paradoxes all mesh with the gender fictions of the twentieth century that Gill-Peterson identifies: gender is an invention of the medical establishment that found itself needing to control the obstreperousness of sex by explaining it as binary. Gill-Peterson brilliantly shows this in Histories of the Transgender Child and summarizes it neatly elsewhere: “[the medical establishment] had also failed, even more spectacularly, to prove that sex was naturally binary in the human species, let alone in other animals. As a result, sex was in a major crisis in the late 1940s, appearing naturally intersex, nonbinary, and trans according to science and medicine.”10 Gender’s plasticity, its slippery slidiness, “provide[s] a powerful example of why the desire to cling to binary sex and gender as natural forms is, ultimately, built upon a house of cards.”11 As Jordy Rosenburg glosses it, “‘Gender’ then became the concept that made binary sex coherent.”12 Unable to deal with or believe in the multi(non)biological materialism of sex facing it, the medical establishment established, to explain what it could not, gender as a form of carceral control. Therefore the recent rise of the revenge of the cis is real—as Ahmed captures it, a “nostalgia for a lost object that can give the impression that the object was real.”13 In offering us an enchiridion on sex and gender, Aristophanes gets at the very nonexistence of cisidentity at the heart of modern fabulated identity of the cisheterorevenge playing out in real, deadly time in the now.

If these nonbinary categories defy the idea of an original cisgender metaphysics and historical materialism whose history is said to be universal, invariable, and predestined, then the introduction of a sex-change operation existing within, even as, Austen Style itself moves us into a much different Austen World, one Austen already occupies, waiting for us to arrive—as she waits to arrive. Of this neuter style, which he characterizes as an impersonal voice, Miller says that it expresses “the desire to be a Person.”14 But what if we push Miller’s reading, his theory, still further because it seems limited to a sexuality that its gender concerns cannot evince, and say that this person-to-come, this Austen Style, this what that we call Austen, is distinctly transgender and nonbinary—although, to be honest here, I have to say that I hesitate to name it at all, for to do so risks a teleological terminology that Austen Style evinces as undesirable; and so it is better, more ameliorative perhaps, so to say, for readers to give it nomination themselves. In Austen World—or, more accurately, the world of the eighteenth century ostensibly fighting so hard both for and against the cisheteropatriarchalness that Austen World wants to abolish—there is as yet no fully free room for this no person, this no one, this impossible that is Austen. If one cannot exactly historically call what I am identifying in Austen Style as transgender or nonbinary (again, the visible is always an ideological constraint on trans people, as Hil Malatino reminds us), we might think of, “see,” find, Austen as well in Grace Lavery’s “trans realism”: the yearning for dysphoric sexed bodies in the narrative ossature of the nineteenth-century ostensibly realist novel.15

Austen’s writing, her novels, then, I want to say, is a disguised autofiction, and also this autofiction, in which she envisions herself as what I want to call a nonbinary son-to-come. Recalling now that in Latin penis means “tail,” we might even give into temptation and say of Austen’s desire, her angry inch (?), that the entail endowed on sons, for her, for her as this son-to-come, as yet lacks its full phallic potential. It lacks, in short, a tail.