On Toxicity and Care in a Chinese Transfem Community

Some among us no longer age; [yet] they have never left, in all pasts and futures.  我们间的一部分已不再老去，她们在所有过去与未来之中从未离开。One Among Us (@oneamong_us)

Few transphobes (in China) have ever seen trans people in real life, but every trans person knows another trans person close to them who have passed away.  你去问那些恐跨人没几个见过活的跨性别，但是每一个跨性别至少都知道身边一个去世的跨性别。Maura (@maura_ciao)

Maybe separation is not that awful. When we are dissolved into the wind after millions of hours, we will be reunited as bubbles in the same cup of beer. No atoms can truly be destroyed in the universe. Sooner or later, we will be together again.  其实分别也没有这么可怕。大概几十几百万个小时后，当我们氧化成风，就能变成同一杯啤酒上两朵相邻的泡沫。宇宙中的原子并不会湮灭。而我们，也终究会在一起。我们也会最终再相见的。Anilovr (One Among Us “Anilovr @Anilovr”)

Introduction

In January, 2024, at least 11 trans girls from the Chinese online trans community on Twitter and QQ passed away due to suicide (@star_tran30449; One Among Us “One-among-Us/Data”). On Twitter, posts announcing these deaths appear almost daily, often accompanied by many more posts from friends and loved ones of those who have attempted suicide, pleading for help. Alongside them are posts and comments from other trans people, mainly trans girls, seeking advice on acquiring lethal substances to end their lives painlessly.

These cases, sadly, only account for a fraction of the total cases of trans suicides in China. According to the latest data in 2021, 69.2% of trans women in China experienced suicide ideations in the past year, and the rate of suicide attempts among all trans people in China was 16.1% (Center 12; Chen, et al. 1126). In the context of China, restrictions in access to gender-affirming care, domestic violence, conversion therapy, state persecution, and social discrimination collectively produce the high rates of suicide for trans people (Center 12; HanLianYi “Crisis”; Lau). The government’s ban on selling hormones online on December 2022, for instance, led to a dramatic surge in suicide rates as it effectively prevented trans children and teens from receiving gender-affirming hormone therapy given the dearth of hospitals capable of providing gender-affirming care. According to another prominent transfem activist, Qinchun [琴春], there have been at least 91 deaths from January 1, 2023 to March 25th, 2023 in the aftermath of this new regulation (Shan). Chunqing’s website renders manifest the state’s active participation in these deaths by documenting systemic efforts carried out by the central and local governments to root out “illegal transgenders” by confiscating their medications in the name of drug control (Shan). While anti-trans murders or government campaigns that explicitly target trans people rarely—though occasionally—occur, the state’s reliance on heterosexual nuclear families for biopolitical management results in a systemic condition where children are completely powerless when facing their parents. For Chinese trans children and youths, absolute parental authority often renders their lives unlivable through domestic violence, forced conversion therapy, or outright abandonment by their families (HanLianYi). Indeed, “in a society that is structured against trans/queer life,” it is understandable how suicide might represent an escape for some trans people who find “the labor of managing the work of living uneasily…as a being battered by the ordinary of contingency and crisis” simply unendurable (Berlant Inconvenience 122; Puar 152; Stanley Atmospheres 94).

It is under these conditions that I compose this piece of writing to excerpt several fragments in trans communities that may offer us a glimpse into how practices of trans care that emerged in Chinese trans communal spaces are both resistant to and shaped by these structural factors. Through these explorations, I aim to contribute to existing critical scholarship that challenges the centrality of the academy as the site for theoretical production by documenting alternate forms of care, communal knowledge, and ways of being whose conditions of production, hopefully, shall one day cease to exist.

The inquiries I undertake in this paper are rooted in archives curated by the community they serve and are impossible without the collective effort and wisdom of our community. I draw my objects of analysis extensively from One Among Us, a memorial website created by members of the Chinese trans community on Twitter and QQ and dedicated to remembering Chinese trans people, especially trans children and youths, who have passed away prematurely (One Among Us “那些秋叶 – One among Us”). To demonstrate how “psychic bonds and collective energies” produce an affective commons comprising both negativity and mutual care, I follow Cvetkovich in troubling the distinction between “producing” and “analyzing” an archive, treating it instead as not only as a repository documenting trans lives that have departed, but also a pivotal hub that affects and is affected by their friends and visitors who interact with their profiles, a process through which the deceased’s connection to the community they once called home remains, “each deceased trans body [becoming] a tangible and intangible temporary home” (Cvetkovich 8-9; Stanley “Affective” 491; Zengin 195). These materials demonstrate how any theorization of trans care cannot be complete without considering our relations with “ghosts that take such care of us” and expanding its purview beyond the narrowly defined venue of being that we call life (Malatino Care ch.1).

This paper draws from Chen’s theorizations of this concept of “toxicity” to name it as an ambiguous yet indispensable condition of possibility for t4t trans care in Chinese transfem communities while highlighting its productive force. Cautioning against romanticizing narratives of t4t trans care that position “care” as an unqualified good, I identify “toxic” relations of care between living and deceased members within the community that could be pernicious or even lethal for its recipients. I argue that while suicidality may involve “utopian” dreams of alternate worlds via imaginaries of afterworlds and reincarnations, these narratives of futurity could result in the foreclosure of hope in one’s present life precisely due to its otherworldly nature. In response, I name “hospice care”—a term I borrow from suicide intervention workers in the community like Mianzhou [眠洲]—as an ethics that responds to these conditions by recognizing trans lives’ present inseparability from pain and trauma and insisting on keeping people alive despite its pain (Mianzhou “Oral History Interview with Mianzhou”). Hospice care names the crucial form of reproductive labor that transfem people perform for each other to “[keep] themselves and their lovers alive” by encouraging an unconditional imperative to life without instituting a pressure to live (Gleeson). Recognizing the “toxicity” of trans care as the effect of the condition where “community and cohesion do not materialize into socially reproductive, sustainable care,” and where that which keeps us alive is simultaneously what could kill us, such an ethics explores how trans care can be powerful precisely due to this unpredictability (Raha “Brokenness” 633).

Toxicity

In Animacies, Mel Chen challenges the distinction between life and death by centering affectivity—“the capacity to affect and be affected”—as the primary locus for thinking about how “dead” or “inanimate” matter moves bodies, objects, and cultural life in general (Chen 11). Specifically, Chen investigates how toxins, despite being inanimate objects, “not only influence the further affectivity of an intoxicated human body, but ‘emotions’ that body” by “lending it particular emotions or feelings as against others” (Chen 11-12). Possessing their own form of sociality when in circulation, toxins are capable of altering their host’s bodily composition in such a comprehensive manner that their host can be made unrecognizable (Chen 205).

What renders Chen’s theorizations of toxicity particularly pertinent to my project is their characterization of toxicity as queerness’ mode of being. According to Chen, toxins bear close affinity with queerness as a form of external threat that, due to its “threatening closeness,” needs to be defended against the fantasy of “an integral and bounded self” (Chen 191, 94). The ability of toxins and its hosts to mutually affect and transform each other offers us an ontology that undermines the very possibility of all fantasies of drawing ontological distinctions between objects (Chen 210). In this section of my paper, I contextualize Chen’s argument by examining the potentially pernicious, or even lethal aspects of queer or trans toxicity in a communal setting, instead of merely repeating the political desirable aspects of care—even the forms of care I recounted above between the deceased and the living. I thus follow Marvin in tracing “ways that t4t as an ethos gets stretched to the point of shattering, when the care it offers short-circuits or is twisted to harm” (Marvin 13). While Marvin’s original essay focuses on the forms of harm that take place between living people, this chapter discusses the more ambivalent aspects in relations of care and harm that exist between the living and the deceased in the community by naming toxicity as both the condition of possibility and a specific genre for trans care, where networks of support and utopic imaginations of futurity can become complicit in producing trans deaths (Gleeson).

One of the primary ways that Chen’s discussion of toxicity relates to trans care is, for better or worse, quite literal: “toxins” are already the means that many trans people in the community employ to end their lives, with certain forms of toxins even acquiring inter-communal popularity for being cheap and effective. The death of CangShanJingYe [倉山静葉], a trans girl and prominent linguistics blogger on Zhihu, inadvertently led to the widespread use of barium chloride as a suicide method after she posted the chemical’s name online (@Citricat_miaow). In most cases, those who attempt suicide will post pictures of the chemicals they wish to ingest on social media, and the time they post them can range from several weeks before their suicide attempt to several minutes after ingestion. Even for those who decided to end their lives quietly, detailed information related to their death can still spread rapidly. Since many trans people are the primary providers of care for their friends and loved ones in the community, people close to those who attempted suicide must know firsthand what chemicals they ingested in order to save them and warn others. Despite their best intentions, the closely-knit ties between community members will almost always result in the rapid dissemination of such information on suicide, and no one can forestall the circulation of information related to one’s passing within the community when such events occur.

Ironically, the visibility of these toxic chemicals on social media is often the primary means for suicide intervention workers in the community to recognize that someone is in danger: in HanLianYi’s brochure for suicide intervention, evidence that someone has recently purchased toxic chemicals places them at the highest risk for suicide and makes them a top priority for intervention (HanLianYi “Intervention”). The conditions of saving someone and helping someone kill themselves become intertwined as both suicide intervention and the act of suicide itself rely on the same sets of information as well as each other to function. The public disclosure of certain toxic chemicals simultaneously transforms into a highly restricted piece of information that no one is permitted to access, while simultaneously becoming the very information that everyone needs to know in order to assist those in need, particularly those they care for.

Moreover, information concerning toxic chemicals spread through the same channels of the otherwise desirable facets of trans care and are even co-constitutive of one another. For instance, suicide drugs and information on their usage may circulate in the same communal infrastructures—though not without substantial pushbacks—the same networks where trans people in China access gender-affirming care and become, in Wang’s words, experts in “vernacular endocrinology” (Wang 1). After all, it is through their experience navigating “underground” access to gender-affirming medications—now increasingly regulated by the Chinese government following media-fueled trans panics—that many have learned how to source chemicals, with some even becoming adept at creating estrogen gels at home. As the most popular chemical in the community for suicide, sodium nitrite, becomes increasingly regulated in China, a brief search on Twitter will reveal cases where trans people are sharing information on how they accessed toxic chemicals, with as many people expressing gratitude for the disclosure as there are criticizing it (@luxuanwen3; @WFA897264). Toxins are even rendered more effective through the labor that those who have already left us engaged in, for they also “perfected” the ways of ingesting those toxins without triggering averse effects that could hamper its results. The adoption of enteric capsules for consuming toxic substances, for instance, is a recent discovery made possible by someone who has successfully passed away using this method (@akasa_musha). Practices that allow trans people in China to accumulate “biomedical and gender literacy while creating alternative endocrine knowledge in the community space” can, ironically and tragically, also be the conditions by which they learned how to effectively kill themselves (Wang 2). Despite one’s best intentions, communal knowledge networks are often indiscriminate regarding the content they help propagate.

It is precisely due to the paradoxical role of toxins as a substance that kills while binding together the living and the deceased that they became identity markers for the transfem community on Twitter. For those who chose or intend to employ them in suicide, popular toxic substances in the community such as barium chloride and sodium nitrite can simultaneously induce sentiments of despair and hope by allowing them to join their friends and loved ones in the community by dying the same ways as they did. Some jokingly divided the “xiaoyaoniang” (“little medicine girls”) [“小药娘”] community in China into three eras based on the doctors that provide them medical care and the chemicals they used for suicide: potassium cyanide, barium chloride, and sodium nitrite (@shizuki_lena). Here, the very term that trans girls in these communities use to refer to themselves—yaoniang [药娘]—is formed by combining the Chinese term for medicine, “yao [药],” with the feminine suffix “niang [娘].” While the term was created decades ago in online transfem spaces to differentiate crossdressers (“weiniang [伪娘]”) who do not require hormones from trans women who do—“medicine” standing for gender-affirming medications—the term does not inherently ascertain what the “medicine” in the term can refer to. The centrality of “medicine” as a metaphor that the transfem community employs for self-definition, juxtaposed with its indeterminacy in terms of content and effects, provides a striking demonstration of the proximity of transness and trans communal care to death. The sociality of toxicity and suicidality, in a trans communal context, embodies what Chen identifies as the most radical challenge that toxins pose to traditional ontological frameworks that assume a distinct separation between the internal and external, the self and the other. Lethal substances, after all, literally transform people’s bodies in ways that often originate from their users’ own desires to end their lives, rendering impossible any attempt to isolate toxins as merely an external, malignant force that is distinctly separable from what may be imagined as the inherently benevolent structures of trans communal care. The effect of trans communal care as an attempt at collective survivance, in this sense, is indeterminate at best, as both the deceased and the living can provide care that allows us to flourish and suffer in ways that they cannot foresee.

The sociality of toxins also evinces a pattern that is all too familiar yet no less painful for those who have been part of this community for a few years: deaths always arrive in clusters. As @Nekohamoukyuu, another activist in the community, puts it,

Surges in suicides often originate from centers of influence, where even the compassionate older sisters, who have assisted many, are taking steps to take their own lives. It is only when this happens that others begin to feel a profound sense of despair.  [自杀潮多是从影响力核心开始，是那些帮过很多人还很善良的大姐姐都要去自杀了，其他人才会感到绝望的。]  (@Nekohamoukyuu “Surges”)

In other words, the loss of prominent members upon whom others deeply depend could potentially precipitate a chain reaction that takes more lives through the very care networks they established, and the suicide cases in January represent just another tragic example of this pattern.

A month later after writing this tweet, @Nekohamoukyuu passed away as well, following her friend Yantian [盐田], another prominent Chinese transfem activist who died of overworking when seeking legal aid and public support for another recently incarcerated trans girl, MoGu [魔骨], who was incarcerated for illegally selling prescription drugs including gender-affirming hormones (@Nekohamoukyuu “Ode”). Yantian and Nekohamoukyuu’s deaths represent only two of the many pivotal nodes whose collapse have contributed to the “avalanche” of suicides in January of those whose lives hinge on the support networks—both materially and psychologically—that activists like them established. More importantly, though, their passing offers us a bleak reminder of how trans deaths are always inseparable from the structures of violence—particularly state and carceral violence—that produce and sustain them. As many more passed away after their suicides, we witness how deaths flow directly from the collapse of communal relations of care that, in many cases, act as the only source of support for many trans children and youths. The impossibility of trans care to live up to its promise due to the “toxic” conditions that animates it is, again, a powerful and disheartening testament to Gleeson’s observation that the work that our communities engage in keeping one another alive—sometimes leading to deaths as well—cannot be collapsed when capitalism remains the dominant mode of production in the world: neither isolated struggles nor trans-specific modes of civil society can guarantee our survival (Gleeson).

In any case, toxins cannot be viewed as mere external threats that are easily separable from the daily functioning of the community itself; rather, its indistinction with the community is the condition of possibility for its effectiveness. Toxins acquire their prowess in the trans community both as the material manifestation and a form of resistance against structural violence that both negates and constitutes us, which has marked many in the community for death long before they are physically in contact with toxic matter. The circulation of toxins—both as material and as information—within the trans community in China provides a powerful and disturbing demonstration of the indeterminability of trans care.

Futurity

On Dec. 29th, 2022, two trans girls in the community, Anilovr and Lan Gou [蓝狗], ended their lives together at the ages of 16 and 17, two months after Anilovr’s parents discovered that she was trans. Their deaths popularized the phrase “Betelgeuse [参宿四],” which, originally referring to a red supergiant star in the constellation of Orion, came to signify the final destination that trans(fem) people will arrive after death, with the galaxy being a euphemism for death and “boarding the galactic train” for the process of passing. According to Lan Gou’s One Among Us profile, Anilovr and Lan Gou borrowed these expressions from Kenji Miyazawa’s 1927 novel Night on the Galactic Railroad, which allegorically depicts the protagonist’s best friend’s death through a dreamlike journey where the protagonist boards a celestial train that can traverse the stars (One Among Us “Anilovr @Anilovr”). In her One Among Us profile, the authors of this page included several quotes adapted from her previous writings. The top of her page contains three sentences originally composed in Esperanto and Chinese: The human world must be destroyed. I will be waiting for you on the Betelgeuse. I truly love every one of you. I really do. [La homa mondo devus esti detruita. 我会在参宿四上等你。 我真的爱你们每一个人。] (One Among Us “Anilovr @Anilovr”)

Already, one may note how the juxtaposition of these sentences simultaneously creates a sense of hope and despair by gesturing towards both the end of the “human” world as we know it and the arrival of an alternate world that enables universal flourishing. Written in Esperanto, a utopian language that once hoped to create a world untethered by linguistic and cultural conflicts, the first sentence is immediately undermined by its anti-humanist message, which I read to be underscoring the necessity of extinguishing the constitutive violence involved in the construction of the “human.” The affective gravity of universal destruction stands in stark contrast with the third sentence, which, due to the absence of a clear referent of the “you” (plural) in the sentence, conveys a message of love for every one of “us,” even a gesture of invitation for others to join them once the time comes.

A focal point for debate since the field’s foundation, the problematics of “hope” and “utopia” has, over the decades, become almost synonymous with optimism and political radicality in queer and trans theory. In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz argues that such an elision misses the radical potential of futurity as a utopic site of imagining world otherwise. For Muñoz, “queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (Muñoz 1). Indeed, if “the future is queerness’s domain,” “there is something queer about the utopian,” and hope “is the emotional modality that permits us to access futurity, par excellence,” then there seem to be nothing within futurity, the utopian, and hope that lie outside Muñoz’s optimistic construction of queerness (Muñoz 14, 26, 98).

One consequences of such construction in his theorization of suicide—in the form of “death art”—as a signifier of incandescence that “moves beyond death as finitude” and gestures towards another world (Muñoz 149). Reading Herko’s final suicide performance, Muñoz critiques gay and lesbian studies’ investments in “positive images” and argues, in a manner similar to all other chapters in the book, that even suicides can provide “an anticipatory illumination of another world” in a manner that resists conventional portrayals of it as the tragic embodiment of hopelessness (Muñoz 149, 53). In this sense, queer performances of suicide, again, corroborates the foundational premise of Muñoz’s project—that queerness is coextensive with utopia, futurity, and hope, with each term almost interchangeable with one another.

Curiously, in the concluding paragraphs of the chapter where Muñoz discusses Herko’s suicide in detail, Muñoz reflects on what his argument’s “abstraction of writing about a suicide ‘as performance’” misses. Recounting stories of his friends who either committed or attempted suicide, Muñoz wonders how queerness may be linked to suicide in ways that cannot be captured by a romantic approbation of suicide as “a performance of radical negativity” that negates “death as ultimate uncontrollable finitude,” how suicide cannot be truly thought without wondering what it “symbolizes for a larger collectivity,” and “whether being gay [would] have made his utopian and vexed queerness any easier or more painful” (Muñoz 167).

While I understand the critical thrust of Muñoz’s reparative hermeneutic of suicide as a utopian act of incandescence that imagines am alternate world, a reading that I also emphasize with, I am more intrigued by this short reflection at the end of the chapter. For me, this short passage invites us to consider what Muñoz’s inability to investigate cases of non-performative queer and trans suicides that take place in trans and queer communities—cases that Muñoz himself alludes to explicitly—could mean, first, for his positioning of suicidal utopianism as being resolutely against hopelessness and, second, for the elision of queerness–as–utopia–as–hope–as–futurity that underpins his work. I argue that suicide reveals how hopelessness need not entail the foreclosure of futurity; rather, suicide and its ideations often engender the very kinds of utopian imaginations that Muñoz advocates for, which assume the form of afterworlds and narratives of reincarnations where affective ties formed in this life can persist without pain and suffering.

A few paragraphs down Anilovr’s message, we encounter another short passage sent to the community upon her passing and one I included in the epigraph of this paper. In a hopeful tone, Anilovr writes that parting is not as terrible as we may think. Since all humans die and matter never vanishes, eons after our passing, elements that ones coagulated to form our flesh and bones are bound to meet with each other once more (One Among Us “Anilovr @Anilovr”).

Reading this metaphor alongside the imagery of the Betelgeuse, one may note how the porosity of our bodies also implies that they are forged from materials descended from the galactic dust that once comprised stars and galaxies, and life’s passing merely signifies their transformation into other forms of matter with higher entropy. In this sense, greeting our deceased friends and loved ones among the stars as specks of stardust becomes a literal reality, a way of envisioning the perpetual cycle of matter and energy that transcends the boundary between life and death. This paragraph, again, intimates toward a future where all her loved ones are no longer separated, where affective ties forged in this life persist against the flow of time.

Similarly, in her suicide note, Lan Gou writes that she finds herself unable to determine whether her decision to commit suicide is a sign of success or failure in her “reconciliation” with life (@dogesir_). After extending farewells and gratitude to her friends in the community, Lan Gou writes in anticipation how she will send postcards to her friends once she arrives at her destination beyond the stars:

…at tomorrow’s dusk, I will be on board the galactic train, returning to the skies to touch the stars…Happy new year, future. [明天的黄昏之时，咱大概已经坐上了银河列车，回归天空触及群星… 未来新年快乐]

Explicitly addressing her letter to the future, Lan Gou, again, highlights how futurity is already at work in trans imaginaries of suicide as an active force that enables our deceased tonglei to abdicate the present world and embrace the unknown. Affective investment in the future, in these cases, exacerbates one’s divestment from the world that we currently live.

Moreover, all the writings discussed above are characterized by a mutual sense of absolute indistinction between futurity and anti-futurity, between hope and hopelessness. Indeed, none of these passages were written in a tone of despair; rather, they demonstrate a radical desire to completely embrace futurity and alternate worlds through death, which inevitably involves a complete affective divestment from the here and now as a site that is beyond repair. If we follow Muñoz in characterizing queer utopianism as “a certain surplus…that promises a futurity, something that is not quite here,” then trans imaginaries of suicide, as the ones portrayed above, are effective and devastating precisely due to their utopian thrust (Muñoz 7). In this process, Betelgeuse becomes a locus bearing many trans people’s suicidal desires, with many people who once offered condolences to Anilovr and Lan Gou later following suit. These collective desires for futurity predicated on death, in this sense, exemplify what Berlant calls “cruel optimism,” where one’s object of desire impedes their flourishing (Berlant Cruel 1).

In other words, utopian futurity—an insistence towards that which is beyond the here and now—already functions in the Chinese transfem community as a form of “toxic” care that exacerbates suicidality, paradoxically through the construction of an alternate world free of suffering and pain, a world that can be easily accessed through the simple procedures of killing oneself. Again, trans care reveals its ambiguity and its potentially troubling implications as both the bond that existed between the two trans teens who shared their death with each other and as the lasting impact of their dreams of futurity on the rest of us. Without recognizing their entanglements with their antitheses, prematurely equating futurity with hope may paradoxically contribute to the foreclosure of both, risking complicity with both disposability culture and structural oppressions that overdetermine the necropolitical production of trans deaths on a regular basis (Thom). None of these passages are devoid of hope; nor are they anti-utopian in any sense of the word. However, the absolute indeterminacy between hope and hopelessness, between the refusal of futurity and a radical embrace of it, calls into question all attempts of romanticizing their political desirability and radicality.

The possibility for care infrastructures and affects of hope to become complicit in the production of death, again, highlights how Muñoz’s failure to grapple with the “toxic” material implications in reading suicide reveals the discrepancies in reading futurity as synonymous with utopianism and political radicality. Hope, in this sense, is indeterminate in its meaning and outcomes at best. It is only by refusing these conflations that we may begin to envision an ethics of care—for those who have left us and those who remain—that embraces these radical indeterminacies while being rooted in the present.

Hospice

Nine months before her death, CangShanJingYe [倉山静葉] posted a note on one of her social media accounts, a message that would later provide great inspiration and guidance for many suicide intervention workers in the community. She wrote,

Although being alive is painful and its purpose elusive, I know that I will never regret trying my best to save others’ lives.  [虽然我活着也很痛苦，不知道意义何在，但是我知道尽力挽回别人的生命一定不会后悔。]  (CangShanJingYe)

For CangShanJingYe, suicide intervention is not a project that guarantees positive outcomes or a sense of existential stability. Instead, it arises from a “selfish” desire to prevent herself from regretting not saving others when their lives were still within her grasp. What gives life meaning and stability—or any semblance of them—is the very process through which she persuades those burdened with the same deafening silences of life to endure it alongside her for just a little longer.

Similarly, Mianzhou, another suicide intervention worker and a founding member of One Among Us, responds to the question asking if she believes people who committed suicide would regret their choice. Mianzhou states that while she cannot speak for the dead, she knows that she will definitely regret it if she did nothing (Mianzhou “Regret”). Even HanLianYi, the most prominent suicide intervention worker in the community, explains extensively in a recent post that while she firmly believes that she is doing good for her subjects, the primary reason why she devoted so much effort to suicide intervention is that she does not want to see anyone die. Han confesses to experiencing trauma after someone she deeply cherished passed away because she failed to intervene promptly (HanLianYi “Partners”). In all these accounts, the community workers’ decision to engage in suicide intervention appears not to be driven by moral or political duty, as one might surmise, but rather by their “selfish” desires to preserve others’ lives, avert regret, and escape the lingering guilt and trauma.

The statements above poses a central question concerning the ethics of suicide of intervention, namely, what is the justification for “forcing” someone to be alive against their consent when suicide may even appear as a “rational” choice of pain reduction for those in extreme pain and distress? This chapter of my paper builds on this question by exploring what Mianzhou, describing the work of suicide intervention, names as an ethics of “hospice care” (Mianzhou “Oral History Interview with Mianzhou”). Originally a form of palliative care commonly offered to those facing terminal illness, hospice care is defined here as a form of communal reproductive labor directed towards a population marked by a specific kind of terminality in the social realm that renders many of their lives bordering on being practically unlivable. In effect, hospice care also refers to the crucial form of reproductive labor that transfem people perform for each other to “[keep] themselves and their lovers alive,” sometimes even despite their explicit wishes (Gleeson; Raha “A Queer Marxist [Trans]Feminism”). What I aim to develop here is an ethics of trans care rooted in the present that, embracing toxicity as a condition of possibility of trans care, navigates the limits of reparativity without promising to neutralize or alleviate pain.

Given the absolute dearth of support that many trans youths—especially those in poverty or facing domestic violence and employment discrimination—receive in China, online trans communities have become primary providers of care for many who cannot disclose their gender identity in real life. As a result, many in the community have engaged in suicide intervention either as non-professionals for their close ones or semi-professionally for anyone who seeks help. Suicide intervention, in this sense, is in no way a singular or isolated event, but a continuous process and crucial form of reproductive labor that trans people perform for each other, especially their loved ones, that acts as the sole barrier preventing its recipients from dying in the face of actual or social death, structural precarity, violence, and oppressions without promising a cure (Raha “A Queer Marxist [Trans]Feminism”). Again, while these intimate ties can offer us a mode of trans care that perseveres in the face of adversities, their severance may heighten the risk of suicide for all within these relationships. Instead of conceptualizing a utopia that lies hundreds of light-years away void of all pain and suffering, hospice care teaches us to examine pain as a potentially irreparable, constitutive condition of life—without, of course, justifying the social conditions that produce suffering—in order to honor the legacy of those who passed away by reserving the future as a space of hope and death. Put differently, temporarily shifting our attention away from the utopian may be precisely the condition for us to survive the kind of finite existence that we call life, which requires a communal commitment to repair that rejects the promise of cure by recognizing the “persistence of negativity in every practice of repair” (Berlant, and Edelman xv). Hospice care calls us to return to the “the crucial and transformative moments between past and future” that Malatino calls the “interregnum” to navigate ourselves through the intricate relations between trauma and politics (Malatino Side 32).

Taking seriously the inseparability of trauma and transness in the community is not equivalent to romanticizing or defending them. Instead, I follow Awkward-Rich in being “committed to the idea that trans lives are ‘lived, hence livable’ while also taking feeling bad as a mundane fact…of being embodied, of being a self in a world inevitably split by difference” (Awkward-Rich 826). Such a reading of the relations between pain and transness may allow us to envision As a result, the coerced severance of such intimate relations of hospice care often result in death. In struggling for the present and the here and now, we may be able to reserve futurity as simultaneously the locus of hope and negativity (as both negation and negative affect) that may allow us to find solace in our eventual reunion with the deceased through death. I theorize trans hospice care alongside with what Berlant theorized as dissociation, or, the sense of “being in life without wanting the world,” as something akin to a preparation for death that, in rendering the final event less painful psychologically, simultaneously provides one the courage to live on as long as they could and the comfort of gradually embracing their demise in a time that they see fit (Berlant Inconvenience 124).

On July 31st, 2018, a trans girl named Yumao [羽毛] ended her life at the age of 17, four months after receiving news of her partner’s death. Before both events took place, Yumao’s partner AyakaNeko [絢香猫], also a trans girl, was forcefully sent by her parents to a conversion therapy school that served as extra-judicial correctional facilities for “disobedient” children, teenagers, and adults (WikiNews; Xing). Prior to her incarceration, AyakaNeko managed to sent Yumao a message, notifying the latter of her whereabouts and asking her to find help. News of AyakaNeko’s plight quickly attracted media attention, yet AyakaNeko’s mother, in an attempt to ward of her friends’ attempts to rescue her, told the media that AyakaNeko committed suicide when, in reality, she was still confined in the conversion therapy institution (One Among Us “Yumao @Zhangyubaka”). When AyakaNeko was eventually released from captivity after one and a half years, she realized that Yumao, under the impression that AyakaNeko was no longer alive, has already passed away (One Among Us “Yumao @Zhangyubaka”).

On her website, Yumao documents the gradual deterioration of her mental well-being after receiving fabricated news of AyakaNeko’s passing through poetry and prose (Yumao “Ayaka’s”). On June 3rd, Yumao wrote a highly metaphorical article describing her relations with herself, AyakaNeko, and the world (Yumao “Untitled”). Its first section, titled “hell,” opens with evocative visual descriptions of how the entire world, filled with the blood of monsters that dominated it, is separated from a “pristine world” existing beyond the horizon, with a blue crystal at its middle outside everyone’s reach. Drenched in blood, the narrator feels herself becomes indistinguishable from the other monsters whose scattered limbs and flesh enveloped her, with no one even caring to see her for who she is. Fortunately, these dreadful conditions are interrupted the arrival of a piece of crystal that fell from the sky, emitting a warm light colored in a crisp shade of pink. As she flies towards the untainted world of blue with the pink crystal, stars that emerged on her body begins to shine, pulsating alongside the crystal. Their journey was abruptly ended as the pink crystal disappeared “after what feels like forever.” After an explosion, the narrator was thrown back to the rivers of blood, the lights on her body dimming. Yumao writes,

This story has ended. Perhaps there will be no sequel. Because I cannot see any more changes. The situation may not get better, and may even get worse. No one can guarantee that the future will get better, and the future does not have to get better either. [这个故事讲完了，也许不会有后续了。 因为我没有看到更多的变化了。 情况或许不会更好，甚至变得更糟。 没有人能保证未来会变好，未来也不是非要变好。] (Yumao “Untitled”)

If we understand “the untainted world in blue” in Yumao’s story to be a life where she could live as the gender she identifies with—instead of one that becomes “a site of death,” then one may see how, for Yumao, her pursuit of life is strengthened by the intimate ties she developed with Ayakaneko and others (Da Costa 628). In these passages, we witness the poetic construction of what hospice care entails: the possibility for trans girls to affirm each other, tend to each other’s wounds and fractured selves, and insist on pursuing the fantasy of pristine world of life while knowing they can never reach it.

As Yumao states how she was forever grateful for Ayakaneko’s recognition of “the darkest, most painful, and buried parts of herself” and of “hugging her already broken self” for the first time, we recognize how the gifts of gender can be given by trans people themselves to each other to dispel the effects of the kind of social death named misgendering (Chu Females; Da Costa 628; Gleeson). At the same time, however, one may note how the bonds of love that Yumao forged with AyaNeko also, tragically, became a crucial factor that contributed to her death when it was forcibly severed by carceral and domestic violence. Relations of love and care in trans communities, again, demonstrate their disturbingly powerful and indeterminate potential for sustaining and taking lives in the face of structural violence.

In an article discussing the relations between toxicity and love, Luce deLire reads Romeo’s sacrifice in Romeo and Juliet as a paradigmatic example of toxic love which, in addition to embracing the infinite aesthetic experience of love itself, also entails a confrontation with the eternity of violence (deLire). Sacrificing one’s life for their lover, however, can only acquire its status as the ultimate expression of love in a capitalistic social structure that, predicated on the exclusionary concept of property, encourages people to see themselves and their loved ones through possessive terms (deLire). Rather than completely rejecting toxicity in exchange for a supposedly untainted romantic sublime, though, deLire reminds us that toxic love is not clearly identifiable from the outset: determining the nature of a relationship—even a sacrifice—is simply impossible due to the myriad of factors that could have contributed to it. Instead, one should embrace indeterminacy as its own source of infinity, which contains both a “indeterminate sublime”, which allows countless possibilities, and the infinity of collective meaning-making, which allow us to confront the radical indeterminacy of life together.

What I find most intriguing in deLire’s account is her emphasis that “toxicity” cannot be used as a neutral normative evaluative framework. Rather, the act of declaring and denouncing a relationship or an act of sacrifice as “toxic” is one that defines toxicity by participating in the same kind of aestheticizing violence that rejects indeterminacy. Attempts at rejecting trans care by virtue of its indeterminacy, in this sense, misses the truly radical “infinities” of indeterminacy and meaning-making. Recognizing how trans deaths are always overdetermined by the structures of violence that surround them, an ethics of trans hospice care embraces the indeterminate, inadequate, and potentially “toxic” outcomes of communal care by positioning indeterminacy and irreparability as the conditions of care. Life may be painful, unpredictable, and meaningless, but it may still be just a bit more livable when we are confronting this chaos for and alongside those we love and care for.

In her Telegram channel, Han Lianyi once recounted a story of a trans girl who relied on these very relations of hospice care to dispel suicidality.

…For over 6 years, from the age of 13 until today, whenever she wanted to die, she would keep repeating the following in her mind: “if I die, my sister Han will be sad and hurt. Even if dying is good for me, it will definitely be bad for my sister Han. So no matter what, I cannot die. Only by living on will I have a chance to help my sister.”  [从她13岁到今天的6年时间里，在每一次抑郁最严重最想死的时候，都会一直在脑海中重复「如果死了，寒姐姐会伤心难过，就算死了对自己是好事，但是对寒姐姐一定是坏事，所以我无论如何都不能死，只有活下去，才能有机会帮到寒姐姐。]  (HanLianYi “Child”)

Han observes that the most profound forms of love she has experienced are not sacrificial or possessive, where one is willing to die for another, but rather, “I am willing to endure even the most crushing pain and suffering to continue living for you” (HanLianYi “Child”). Hospice care thus offers a resolute diversion from the forms of “toxic” love that deLire critiques. Instead, by embracing the indeterminacy of life and one’s instability, hospice care represents the kind of ethics that Thom gestures towards in stating that “love and care might mean following someone, even after they have rejected you. That it might mean reaching out, and failing, and then reaching out and failing, again and again” (Thom part 1). Despite the harshness of life, hospice care refuses the call from a utopian afterlife without suffering and insists on the necessity of care in the present moment practiced by all of us. Such an approach to pain and suffering neither romanticizes them nor dreams of their disappearance in the present world; rather, it accepts pain and death as the facticity of life to help those who practice it prolong their life as much as possible. While life may be meaningless and filled with trauma, one can still attempt to help each other confront it together, even with no guarantee that the pain will be lessened in any way.

In what is arguably her most famous essay, “On Liking Women,” Andrea Long Chu echoes the sentiments expressed by transfem people in the community when trying to illustrate the foundational role of disappointment in the construction of desire and its ungovernability. Chu states that it is not simply that many trans women want to be cis women; it is that they “wish they were women, period” (Chu “Liking”). Narratives of reincarnation, despite their orientation towards futurity, do not simply inscribe utopic hope in the way that Muñoz anticipates. Their silent wish for transness not to befall those who passed away because of it—either due to its own potentially destructive properties or the fallout of its existence in society—teaches us, again, about the intimate relations between hope and hopelessness, between repair and its impossibility. “What I want isn’t surgery;” says Chu, “what I want is never to have needed surgery to begin with. I will never be natural, but I will die trying” (Chu Females).

The disturbing possibility for trans negativity’s persistence despite our attempts to repair the conditions of life., in this formulation, can teach us something about how gendered desires, trauma, and pain are inseparable from our daily existence in a way that cannot be rectified by trans inclusion. In wishing other trans people to be reincarnated as the gender they identify with without qualifying it in any way, trans people in the community recognize the constitutive otherness—what Chu calls “femaleness”—in the construction of our desires and gendered selves.

The concept of “reincarnation” has played a central role in shaping how death and mourning are imagined within the community. A simple search on Twitter would immediately reveal countless cases where both those who ended their lives and those sending their condolences expressed the same wish for the deceased trans girls to become “girls” in the next life, without the word “girl” being qualified in any way (@juzh50533467; @WFA897264). While the term “cis” is not explicitly mentioned, it is certainly implied as something that should be understood in silence. Of course, everyone knows the axiom that trans women are women, yet this utterance holds little value for trans women forced to embrace death as an escape from the forms of violence—misgendering being one of its most explicit and visceral expression—that transness carries in our current world. While we do need to create a gender inclusive world that fully recognizes trans people’s gender identifications, we must also to consider the possibility that no amount of political activism could ever deliver us from pain, that life may never get better regardless of how hard we try, and that transness’s intimate relations with pain may simultaneously erode and empower us.

Chu’s statements echo the ethics of hospice care in embracing pain as an inseparable condition of life. While it is precisely due to our familiarity with the kinds of pain that feels so viscerally inseparable from transness that we do not wish it upon our loved ones in their next life, it is also the case that we refuse to let go of our desires and attachment to those forms of pain. Desires for death, like all desires, may only become instructive insofar as we refuse to imbue them with meanings or messages that we wish they should carry, by refusing to the circular loop that “ends up proving the very same assumptions with which it began” (Sedgwick 135). It may be only taking pain and negative affects “as a fact of being embodied” without “seeking out its source in order to alleviate it” that we may be able to focus on the interim space between past and future to attend to the multiplicity of affective structures, especially the less positive ones, that arise in our relations with society and each other (Awkward-Rich 824; Malatino Side 35).

Hospice care’s attachment to the present and its openness to its radical indeterminacy, in this case, are what grants it is strength. Trans care, for better or worse, provide us one of the least worst option that would inevitably end in a spectacular failure since a world devoid of pain, strife, and suffering can only exist in death. Life may be painful and meaningless, but as long as we are surviving it together, we may be able to stay here just a bit longer, until, one day, we can embrace our demise alongside one another.

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