Hello, Cruel World (Second Edition)

blog — March 28

Excerpt — Paul B. Preciado’s Afterword to “Hello Cruel World, 2nd Edition” by Kate Bornstein

March 31st marks Trans Day of Visibility. Created in 2010 by trans advocate and human rights activist Rachel Crandall, Trans Day of Visibility is a celebration of the extraordinary lives and cultural contributions of trans people. It is also a moment to acknowledge and campaign against the disproportionate levels of discrimination, violence, and political repression faced by trans communities all over the world, and especially in the United States in 2025.

To mark the occasion, we are proud and excited to share an exclusive excerpt from our forthcoming new edition of Hello Cruel World by the iconic Kate Bornstein. This excerpt, an afterword written by trans writer, theorist, and advocate Paul B. Preciado, specifically speaks to the importance of representation as a way of offering an option for people who may find themselves at odds with their assigned gender. As he says in the latter half of the afterword, "Knowing our own desire requires research, experimentation, invention, and risk." In other words: it requires having access to the knowledge that gender is not fixed and can be transformed. It requires a sort of visibility. This is especially important given the newly emboldened right-wing effort to silence, criminalize, and even disappear the very notion of gender variance — criminalizing not only gender-affirming care and trans pedagogy, but removing the concept of trans existence from public schools and libraries. Visibility is important to combatting these efforts: in many ways, it is the first step to fighting back. 

The 20th anniversary edition of trans trailblazer Kate Bornstein’s unconventional guide to staying alive for teens, freaks, and gender outlaws.

This new edition of Bornstein's groundbreaking Hello, Cruel World features a catalog of 121 alternatives to suicide that range from the playful (moisturize!), to the irreverent (shatter some family values), to the controversial, fun, challenging, and easy. Encouraging readers to unleash their hearts' harmless desires, the book has only one directive: "Don't be mean." It is this guiding principle that brings the reader on a self-validating journey and toward a resounding decision to embrace life.

Suicide rates among LGBTQ+ teens are much higher than for their cis peers; with love and humor and confession and insight, Bornstein hopes to keep every freak out there alive. She is a radical role model, an affectionate best friend, and a guiding mentor all in one. This one-of-a-kind guide to staying alive is a much-needed, sometimes unorthodox approach to life for those who want to stay on the edge, and alive.

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HELLO CRUEL WORLD (SECOND EDITION)
101+ Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws
BY KATE BORNSTEIN

AFTERWORD BY PAUL B. PRECIADO

Some babies are born with a star on the wrong side. Like Kate Bornstein, I was born into a family with strong religious beliefs — hers was Jewish, mine Catholic. She was born in 1948 in an America characterized by McCarthyism, the persecution of homosexuals, and racial segregation. I was born in 1970 in Franco’s Spain. I spent the Saturdays of my childhood at church while others went to the disco. We Catholic children read the Bible, staged plays inspired by the lives of the saints, prepared packs of aniseed doughnuts which we sold on Sundays at church. Everything was separated by gender: boys studied to be altar boys, varnished wooden clothespins, and assembled them into crosses; girls embroidered their names on white handkerchiefs. Some children grew up with a star nailed to the palm of their hand. I loved Masses, the rituals, the glow of candles, the smell of incense, the body of Christ and Mary Magdalene’s hair, the water turned into wine, the retreat of the enlightened in the desert, the apostles who became polyglot when they were filled with the Holy Spirit coming in the form of a dove and the apparitions of the angels. But I hated sewing. My handkerchiefs were dirty rags filled with knots.

Some teens grow up with a star staked through their heart. On my tenth birthday, two events occurred, both unexpected and unfortunate: I fell in love with my friend Elena, and Elena fell in love with Leo, the only Black boy in town. We both had the worst summer of our lives. I sought refuge in Luis Cernuda’s poems. Elena ended up dating Tomás, a white neighbor. Leo and I didn’t date anyone. Shortly thereafter, Leo’s parents moved to another city. That’s how I realized love wouldn’t be easy for me. Nor for Leo. And, perhaps, not even for Elena. Another day of the same year, in winter, a group of boys was waiting for me after school. They shouted “tortillera” (dyke) as they threw a snowball in my face. The ice burned my cheeks. I wasn’t surprised that they insulted me, I was surprised that they knew I was a lesbian before I’d gone out with anyone. I wiped my face and continued on my way as if nothing had happened. Some teens grow up with a star stuck to their foreheads. I went home and locked myself in my room. At home, the situation wasn’t better: my mother, alerted by a nun about my “male behavior” (what did they actually mean?) was monitoring my actions, choosing my clothes, judging my friendships.

What did others really know about my desire? I grew up thinking that I was a monster and that if I didn’t run away the others would end up killing me. At that time, my only political body of freedom was imagination: when the door to my room was closed, I dreamed that aliens would come to my town and save me. The problem is not that you can’t do something, but that you can’t even imagine it. The aliens were like me: skinny and kind monsters who wrote poems and mathematical equations, beings who were neither men nor women, neither animals nor humans, neither white nor black. But the aliens never came, and back then, in a small town in northern Spain, there was no organization, no book that could help me. I think I was still a teenager when I made the decision to leave and never come back. Seven years later, I began a sexual and intellectual exile that led me from book to book, from place to place, from language to language, from identity to identity, until I became what I am now.

On this road, in the different passages of the deserts of the norm that I have crossed and keep on crossing, Kate Bornstein’s books and performances have been like stars in a night sky for monsters in exile. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (1994) was one of my bedside books when I was twenty years old in New York. In the 1990s I self-identified as “tortillera.” I reclaimed the slur with which I had been insulted in my childhood, but like Kate I felt neither male nor female. Unlike the queer academic books of Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis, or Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gender Outlaw was a true first-person cartography of dissent: the diary of a survivor of gender and sexuality, a navigation manual for the beginners and the migrants. Kate was able to talk to my injured inner child and encourage him to explore a new territory: desire beyond sexual and gender binaries. Little by little, and against the expectations of my Catholic teachers, her life and work would be the equivalent of what, in the tradition of devotion, was the life of the saints. For me, Kate Bornstein became Saint Trans of Gender Outlaws, Saint Masochist of Good Love, Saint Borderline of Freaks and Suicides.

On September 11, 1998, I went to listen to Kate Bornstein’s presentation of her book My Gender Workbook in New York. At the end of the reading, I overcame my shyness to ask if she would give me her address so I could invite her to participate in a publication. Kate immediately pulled out a business card and handed it to me. I put it in my pocket, happy to have her home address, and it was only several years later that I realized there was no postal address or phone number on the card. There were only three words printed: Kate Bornstein. Traveling. Some monsters carry stars in their pocket. This card is a political fetish that still accompanies me. The absence of an address, telephone, or profession was an active resistance to the imposition of an identity, a hymn to freedom: Kate Bornstein was on a journey.

To a specific theory of gender or sexual identity, Kate Bornstein opposes a general philosophy of travel. According to her, we are not male or female, heterosexual or homosexual: we are travelers. Sexual or gender identity is only a “means of transport”: An identity, she says, is used for taking you somewhere . . . but it cannot take you to all places. If you want to go elsewhere, you will have to change your identity. To live is to leave the known place of assigned identity and norm and begin to explore the unknown territory of desire. This is the paradox that Bornstein confronts us with: in order to know our own desire, it is necessary to dare to change, because the ready-to-wear desire, the desire based on a fixed identity, has been territorialized by power and imposed through norm, violence, and abuse. Knowing our own desire requires research, experimentation, invention, and risk. To know our own desire means abandoning our assigned identity and going on a journey.

This philosophy of travel is based on a psychobiological theory of transformation: in the same way that the chameleon is characterized by its ability to shift skin colors in order to adapt to its environment, the human being, with its linguistic complexity and cerebral plasticity, is characterized by the ability to change, to learn, and to modify itself. Against the tide, Bornstein teaches us that what is natural for human beings is not identity, but shift. It is power over, with its ambition to control the processes of reproduction, that prevents identity from shifting.

Gender Outlaw and My Gender Workbook helped me overcome the fear of transforming my subjectivity by taking testosterone. Her books helped me overcome the fear of changing my voice, my name, and my body. Fear of being judged, rejected, or persecuted. For those of us who have taken to the road and begun a gender transition at the beginning of the new millennium, Kate Bornstein and Leslie Feinberg are our grandparents; Del LaGrace Volcano and Ashley Hans Scheirl are our older brothers. Bornstein and Feinberg invented a language, they made it possible to have a body, opened a path. Volcano and Schreil invented an aesthetic, an image. Some of us walk with a thousand bright stars above our heads.

Bornstein’s politics, as presented here in Hello, Cruel World, is a broad feminism in which the category “transgender” serves as a means by which to transcend and overcome differences in identity. Bornstein teaches us that the first duty of a feminist is not to defend the identity of “woman,” but to defend the freedom to transgress what society expects of us. The prime directive of a feminist is to survive the imperative of death faced by sexual and gender minorities. Bornstein rejects medical and legal categories and replaces them with political definitions: feminists, homosexuals, and transsexuals are “transgender” to the extent that they transgress heteropatriarchal norms. The proposal is to go beyond identity politics (feminist, gay, lesbian, trans) in which everyone identifies with the identity that oppresses them in order to build a transversal alliance of dissidents of sexuality, gender, class, race, disability . . .

There is another social group that Bornstein considers to be transgender: teens. Neither children nor adults, neither totally submissive nor totally free, teens are gender mutants whose gender is in a constant shift, and so they suffer like no other social group from the pressure of the norm. Hence the wave of teenage suicides that succumb each year to the imperative of becoming male, female, and heterosexual. Hello, Cruel World is also a love letter addressed to teens. But it is not a book just for teenagers aged thirteen to nineteen years old. For Kate Bornstein, adolescence is not an age or syndrome, but the moment when our ability to mutate is expressed with the most vehemence, grace, and fragility, just before being silenced by society. This book is written for the teen locked inside each of us: the one who has lost their dream, forgotten their infinite desire for transformation, the one who has gotten used to accepting the desires of others rather than pursuing their own. Hello, Cruel World is for the teen who still lives in you. Now open this book, and travel.

—Paul B. Preciado
September 17, 2018
Venice, Italy