Welcome to Trans Tuesday! We fight and we struggle to do the work to accept the truth of who we are… and a whole lot of people in our lives are primed to punish us for it. Let’s get into THE IMPERFECT TRANS ALLEGORY OF KPOP DEMON HUNTERS, part 3!
Okay, let’s dive right in! Because you’re waking up to the ways of the world, you’ll want all the information you can get your hands on, and reading PART 1 and PART 2 is the way to do that!
42:49 – Huntrix works on their song to take down the Saja Boys, but Rumi coughs when only speaking lyrics, it’s getting harder and harder for her to keep up the facade.
43:15 – Rumi corners a demon. “Are you a prisoner too? Is Gwi-Ma making you do this?” Mira kills the demon before it can respond. Rumi has never asked this before, and she reacted emphatically against demons being anything more than evil and worth destroying, when Zoey suggested maybe they weren’t all evil. Her growing doubts about maintaining the cis lie, and her encounter with the community in Jinu, are changing her.
43:44 – While working on their Saja Boys diss track, Mira suggests the lyrics, “A demon with no feelings doesn’t deserve to live.” Zoey says “it’s so obvious!” Rumi’s bothered by it, but doesn’t say anything.
45:36 – Jinu: “Look, if I help [Gwi-Ma], he’s promised to erase my memories, and those voices in my head will be gone.” This is just like Cypher in The Matrix, wanting to “go back in” and forget that he knows the truth, because it’s too difficult to deal with.
Rumi calls Jinu pathetic. Jinu: “I’m pathetic? You can’t even talk about your patterns.” Rumi: “You want to talk about patterns? I hate them! Just like I hate all demons. How I hate Gwi-Ma.” Jinu: “If hate could defeat Gwi-Ma, I would have done it a long time ago.”
Hate can’t defeat hate… which, okay, I’m sorry, but is a key theme of Matrix Revolutions. Really, please, just read Begin Transmission already maybe. Ask your library to get it or whatev!
46:24 – A young fan gives Jinu a drawing of him as an angel that says, “Jinu, you have a beautiful soul.” It makes him think.
46:56 – Rumi’s working on the diss track, quietly sings:
When your patterns start to show
I see a pain that lies below
She knows. Is she finally admitting it to herself, even while thinking she’s singing about Jinu?
47:56 – Mira asks why Rumi’s changing the lyrics. Rumi: “Do you really think this is the song to beat Gwi-Ma? It’s so hateful.” Mira: “Yeah, because we hate him, and we hate demons.”
48:20 – Mira: “…I just can’t shake this feeling that you’re keeping something from me.” Rumi lies and denies it. Mira apologizes. “I can’t wait until every [demon] is destroyed and sent back to suffer with Gwi-Ma for all eternity. Right, Rumi?” Rumi: “Yeah, eternal suffering. Sounds fun.”
Hey, that’s what she’s already dealing with by being forced to live a lie.
49:06 – The Saja Boys’ popularity grows and they harvest more souls, which leads to “missing persons”. So we see that when souls are harvested for Gwi-ma, the people they belong to disappear from the world. Which is definitely how it feels when someone you knew and cared about falls over the edge into transphobia and makes it their entire personality (like they always do).
49:55 – Rumi meets with Jinu again. Rumi: “What if I told you there’s another way to get your freedom? …Help us win the Idol Awards. Because when we win, the Honmoon will be sealed. And that will guarantee your freedom. Gwi-Ma will be permanently cut off, and all the demons will be gone from this world. I will finally be free of these patterns. No more hiding. No more secrets. You can be on this side when the Honmoon is sealed. Away from the demon world, away from Gwi-Ma. You can be free from those voices forever.”
If you don’t see where this is leading, stick with me until the end…
Jinu: “What makes you think the Honmoon can save a guy like me?” Rumi: “A guy who tried to help his family? You made a mistake, Jinu. …But I am a mistake. Have been since the moment I was born. So I have to believe. Because if there’s no hope for you, what hope is there for me?”
Rumi: “That’s the funny thing about hope. Nobody else gets to decide if you feel it. That choice belongs to you.” Jinu: “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re a mistake.”
Note how they can each support the other in ways that they cannot support themselves, even though they both have demon patterns aka are trans. This is again another aspect of the importance of community, we can often spot INTERNALIZED TRANSPHOBIA in each other easier than we can spot it in ourselves.
52:15 – Huntrix is rehearsing the Saja Boys diss track, but Rumi’s again thrown off by the lyrics.
53:21 – Huntrix argues as they kill demons. Mira: “Why are you questioning everything we stand for when we’re so close to sealing the Honmoon? What are you not telling us, Rumi? What are you hiding from us? …If you’re with us, prove it.”
And they all then kill a whole lot more demons.
Rumi, singing, trying to convince herself, all while hating herself:
A demon with no feelings
don’t deserve to live
It’s so obvious
Zoey: “You know I’m always on your side, but it’s really hard to understand this time. We can’t win this without your voice, Rumi.” Even your friends, even those you love the most, and who claim they love you, will withdraw that support when you display signs of your truth. Again, this is what my mother did to me at every hint of the inner girl I was, all while claiming that she loved me “no matter what.” But her love was always conditional and based on me living up to the idea of who I was in her head, and not who I actually am. See TRANS PARENTS (Mother’s Day) for more on that complicated issue.
55:53: Rumi meets with Jinu again. Jinu: “I want to believe in your crazy plan, but I don’t think I’m the one to help you.” Rumi: “Actually, you already have. I spent my whole life keeping this secret, this shame of what I am, and the more I hid this shame, the more it grew and grew until it started to destroy the one thing that gave me a purpose, my voice. But since I’ve met you, and the more I talk to you, I don’t understand it, but somehow, my voice has healed.”
Being around other trans people, around community, makes her feel like there is a place for her. Like she belongs, even while she’s still struggling to accept herself.
Singing:
I tried to hide, but something broke
I tried to sing, couldn’t hit the notes
The words kept catching in my throat
I tried to smile, I was suffocating though
But here with you I can finally breathe
You say you’re no good
But you’re good for me
I’ve been hoping to change
Now I know we can change
But I won’t if you’re not by my side
Why does it feel right
Every time I let you in?
Why does it feel like
I can tell you anything?
All the secrets
That keep me in chains and
All the damage
That might make me dangerous
You got a dark side
Guess you’re not the only one
What if we both tried
Fighting what we’re running from?
We can’t fix it if we never face it
What if we find a way to escape it?
Let the past be the past
‘Til it’s weightless
Jinu, singing:
You’re waking up all these parts of me
I thought were buried for good
Between imposter and this monster
I been lost inside my head
Ain’t no choice when all these voices
Keep pointing me towards no end
It’s just easy when I’m with you
No one sees me the way you do
Rumi:
So take my hand
It’s open
What if we heal what’s broken?
So the beauty in this song is both Rumi and Jinu think they’re talking about banishing their transness so they never have to think about it again, but subconsciously they’re both actually talking about living a life where they’re free to be their trans selves and they’re banishing the false cis shells so they never have to think about those again.
When they rise into the sky together, the colors are super transy.
59:26 – Jinu: “I don’t hear [Gwi’Ma’s] voice. I’ll make sure the Saja Boys lose tomorrow.” Rumi: “Then we’ll both win.” Jinu almost comes clean about his past, but then chickens out.
1:00:14 – A now much more powerful Gwi-Ma, due to all the souls the Saja Boys have harvested (because hate grows in strength the more it propagates itself, this also happens in the Matrix until it threatens to destroy all of society, just read Begin Transmission already!), pulls Jinu back to the underworld. Gwi-ma: “That’s funny, I thought for a moment you actually believed you could be free. …Because if you really believed her, if you really thought you could escape what you are, what you did… you would have told her the truth. You betrayed your own family. You left them behind. …Don’t forget about our deal, Jinu. Because I can turn those voices up. Or, they can be gone. Don’t think you can escape what you are.”
Jinu betrayed his family and “left them behind,” and Gwi-ma calls this a betrayal.
But when we transition and our cis family and friends and society don’t accept us, that’s not a betrayal. We weren’t lying to everyone, we were trying to be who they said we had to be. They lied, explicitly or implicitly, by acting like cis was all we could ever be. See SOCIETAL GASLIGHTING and CIS SPOUSAL SUPPORT and CIS GRIEF for more.
Also, and this is super, super important:
You used to be required to leave your family, friends, and life behind in order to access medical transition care! It was required of us, by cis people! See TRANSMEDICALISM for more on those horrors that cis people put us through.
This is what society does to us. Tells us there’s no such thing as trans people, we’re not trans, we can’t be trans, being trans is wrong and bad, okay well if you must be trans you have to pretend to be cis and never ever let anyone know you’re trans, and leave all your loved ones behind (they probably don’t support you in this anyway), and then blame trans people for “abandoning” our families.
That’s some fucking insidiousness.
Also a very real issue many of us still deal with today is being abandoned by our families once we come out (and they put the blame for their choices on us). See the 2022 US TRANS SURVEY REPORT part 1, 2, 3, and 4 for statistics on that.
1:01:20 – Rumi rides the magic tiger back, and we again get a flashback of Celine telling Rumi: “Nothing can change until your patterns are gone.” Breaking that conditioning is really, really hard. Especially when we don’t have examples we can look to, of other people who’ve already transitioned and are happy, and prove it’s possible.
1:01:52 – Huntrix discusses how the diss track isn’t the right song to win the contest, and it won’t unite their fans because it doesn’t even unite them. Hate is like that.
Mira: “I know our faults and fears must never be seen, but look, I’m kind of a difficult person. Overly blunt, short-fused, highly aggressive. My whole life those things were a liability. But somehow, with you guys, they’re okay.”
Zoey: “I feel the same way. Before I joined Huntrix, I felt like my thoughts and my lyrics and all my notebooks were just useless and weird. But with the two of you, they mean something. I mean something.”
The importance here is that cis people don’t and can’t fully understand what it’s like to be trans, but they know what it’s like to be shunned for who you are, and to have expectations to live up to that don’t align with who you are.
They can empathize with us on other levels.
If they want to.
Rumi: “I’m afraid of losing you guys too. …All these fears? It’s the demons talking. But tomorrow we can win this war, and when the Honmoon is sealed, we will be free of these demons. Free of these fears forever.” Rumi then says after, maybe they can relax and go to the bathhouse… because she believes her patterns will be gone. She can ignore her transness and just be like the other cis girls.
They decide to sing Golden for the contest. Rumi: “It’s a song about the best of us.” I mean, is it though? Rumi’s still hoping this will all just go away.
1:06:04 – As Mira and Zoey get lured away by demons, Rumi sings Golden on her own, and the Honmoon starts turning gold.
1:06:20 – The power cuts out, Golden stops dead.
1:06:54 – The demons take the form of Mira and Zoey, and switch the song to the confrontational Takedown, which Huntrix decided not to use because it was not who they were. They rip off parts of her costume, exposing her demon patterns. Rumi’s terrified of how people are going to react.
1:07:30 – The demons whisper to Rumi: “We know what you are. You’re a demon. A mistake. You have been since the day you were born.” They’re forcefully OUTING her to the entire world, so she’ll be rejected and it will feed the anti-trans hate.
1:07:41 – Rumi screams with her demon voice again, the transy lights shatter. They’re also representative of the blue of the Honmoon/closet, and the pink of the demons/trans people.
Her demon patterns glow in the dark. She’s alone, scared, in the only remaining spotlight in the dark. She’s out, and the whole world can see her for who she truly is.
1:08:06 – Rumi runs offstage, meets the real Mira and Zoey. As she steps toward them, they step back, eyes wide in shock. Rejection.
Zoey: “How do you have patterns?” Rumi: “These were supposed to be gone.You were never supposed to see!” Mira: “You were hiding this from us this whole time?” Rumi: “No, I have a plan to erase them. … I was using [Jinu] to fix all this. To fix me! So we could all do our duty! We could all be strong. Be together.” Zoey: “How could we be together if we can’t tell your lies from your truths, Rumi?”
Yes, it’s your fault for not telling us about the thing that would make us hate and reject you, not our fault for hating who you really are. This is, sadly, the standard cis transphobe line of thinking.
1:09:01 – Rumi: “No! Don’t leave! I can still fix it!” On “fix it,” her voice warps and sounds demonic, and sends more pink ripples through the Honmoon.
1:09:17 – Mira and Zoey raise their demon-slaying weapons, ready to oppress the person they claimed to care about. Rumi cries and runs away.
Rejected by those she loves for the truth of who she is. It’s an incredibly awful bit of bullshit that way too many trans people have to deal with.
Next week we wrap it all up with truth, acceptance, and… you’ll see why this allegory, that speaks to us in so many ways, is “imperfect.”
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com