The Silly Costumes We Wear

 

Erasure of Identity, or how Society Others Those Who do not Fit into a Homogenized Worker that Benefits the One Percent

An Essay by Solomon Skalozub and Daedric Blackflame

Content Warnings: discussions of racism, xenophobia, ableism, sexual assault, sexual harassment, physical abuse, emotional abuse, transphobia, dysphoria

To escape

The sun is setting on a middle of nowhere town, and in the middle of one dusty, empty street, a little girl with knees and knuckles bloodied gets back onto a bicycle. Her mother disdained at her boyish tendencies, and despite her protests to have the training wheels on her bike removed, her mother refused. She therefore then stole away into the evening–across the street to ask her neighbour if she could borrow his bike, which had no training wheels, to learn.

Her friend had long since been called in for supper, she was alone on the street and still falling after each attempt. She had long since ignored the calls to come back inside–she would get this, she had to. To spite her mother and brother who didn’t think she could do it, to spite her mother who wanted her to be a docile princess. She tumbled off the bike again, she wiped her blood on her torn jeans, and she tried again.

It was dark by the time she got it, by the time she was able to ride the bike without falling. Nobody was there to see this side of her, the side that achieved victory, alone, on that dark and empty street–the side of her that reviled in the pain her torn skin gave, and the pride that despite it, she achieved her goal.

In this solitude, she didn’t feel much like a girl–but he would come to terms with that much later in life. The little girl quietly returned her neighbour’s bike back to his yard. She looked across the street, knowing she would have to go home, knowing that under her mother’s scrutiny she would have to explain the blood and the bruises–knowing she would have to wear that girl shaped mask again.

Someday, she was sure, she would become that bloody knuckled, not quite a girl–maybe something else entirely–thing again.

Why are we writing this?

Much of Solomon’s life has been him treating the worst experiences he’s faced as though they are puzzles to solve. Viewing his own pain as a mystery, something to peel the layers back on, an attempt to gain closure–it disassociates him from the reality of those experiences. He is outside his own body, examining his life as though it were a simulation, as though he can make sense of the human condition by understanding sociology and his own place within it.

It’s a fool’s errand. Though, acknowledging oneself a fool merely opens one up to learning deeper understanding than was possible prior.

This essay is about examining that growing understanding, about examining how the different pieces of one’s experiences are more conjoined than they may seem on the outset. Solomon argues, that by breaking ourselves into different pieces, that by forgetting that different forms of oppression (historical and ongoing) are interconnected, we fall into the trap set for us. This trap is intended to keep us from realising that the people who benefit off our labour, our poverty, our oppression, don’t differentiate based on what kind of “other” they think we are, and intersectionality is our key to confronting this.

To Daedric, erasure reminds them of indifference. They describe their childhood as such: “Let me explain, I grew up to a racist, bigot of a mother who gambled her funds away, leaving me and my older brother to starve most of the time unless either my father or uncle intervened. My mother once said, ‘I’ve always known you were different.’ How? As I grew up, I never faced much in terms of the trans identity, but I was often a tomboy–playing in the mud, sleeping on the ground and overall a wild child. I only learned I myself was nonbinary when I met my first ever true friend, that friend being Solomon himself. After learning from him, my eyes, my indifference began to shift, and essentially wanted away from my old self–the body I was trapped in.”

We (Solomon and Daedric) continue to exist in a world that both pretends we are invisible, but that on the same token would socially reward us were we to abandon pieces of ourselves seen as undesirable–be they too political, too weird, too hard to understand. Solomon learned the hard way, around the ripe age of seven, what the punishment for being a freak is. He was incentivized to just forget, to just “be normal” afterwards–but perhaps it is time to talk about it.

What actually is erasure?

Erasure as a concept is often treated as though it is the practice of not acknowledging someone’s existence. In specificity to marginalized groups associated with the concept, such as transmasculine people, the idea is that people simply “forget we exist” when espousing their transphobia.

It is however, far more insidious than that.

To erase a group is not simply the innocent ignorance of not knowing they exist, it is the act itself of ensuring they are erased. They are forced to abandon their identity and take one forced upon them, and this is not simply something that happens to transmasculine people–it is far more broad than that.

Solomon was perceived as being too masculine from the moment he could walk and speak. He would play in the mud after being forced to wear girly clothes, he would complain about being given dolls instead of action figures, he would pretend to be fictional male characters he looked up to as a means to escape, if only for a moment, the girlhood forced onto him. Erasure didn’t begin when he came out as a trans man, it began the moment he rejected femininity. He got treated as though his tomboyishness would disappear with age, but when it didn’t, when he became more aggressive and defiant, he was put into psychiatric care.

By the age of seven he was diagnosed with a list of disorders and put onto four different medications without proper blood testing (one was lithium, he does not know/remember the rest). He had teacher’s aids following his every move and physically abusing him for any perceived slight. He continued to exacerbate it, however, by talking back to them, by struggling when they held him down, by throwing desks at them when they tried to corner him. They would lock him in rooms, write down every word he said while distressed to report back to his parents, and restrict bathroom use (quite literally timing him and punishing him if he took longer than one to two minutes). He would get punished at home for reacting to their abuse with aggression, making it impossible to have an adult to turn to. And yet he still got into fights, he still bit, clawed, and kicked his way through most of these experiences.

Only he was portrayed as the violent one. The violence enacted onto him was seen as justified. He did not fit into the role of a girl, he was in effect, a monster in the form of a girl. He did not fit into the role of a well behaved child, his ADHD, probable other mental health conditions, and trauma responses made him too difficult. He was not a girl, or a child, he was simply a problem.

He was pulled out of psychiatric care after a couple years, public school as well. Homeschooling seemed like the better option to his parents at the time–it didn’t last long. His father realised that he wasn’t being blood tested properly for the medications he was on, and his response was to not only completely pull Solomon from care, but to dismiss any diagnosis that he had gotten, or that any child psychologist suspected he needed. After all of that, he was told he was “normal” and that he had to act like there was “nothing wrong with him.”

The erasure of his personhood, both his boyish gender expression and the way his mind and emotions worked differently from people around him, was not for his benefit but for the comfort of others. He had to be a “normal girl” for the sake of his parents, he had to stop being a problem. When you boil it down, that’s what erasure truly is, it’s the violent social forces that tear away parts of you greater society doesn’t want you to have. As a “normal girl” his purpose became to be a support for his friends and family, a future mother and wife. If he’s not a “normal girl” his parents don’t get grandchildren (or, if they do, it requires him being a pregnant man, which is a monsterized concept). If he’s not a “normal girl” some cisgender man loses out on a wife to take care of him. The pushback on his masculinity, the forces of erasure, their goal was to mold him into a being who existed to service others, his needs and desires are secondary.

“Erasure equals indifference.” Daedric upholds. In their own words: “What do I mean by this? Essentially, as both a Metis, and a trans person–nonbinary to be exact, I looked at the world with a clouded, bored gaze. I was so used to how I was treated, it felt normal: the bullying for being different, the common racial slurs my mother threw around became the norm in my home, and the fact I was trapped in a situation where a) I had no father figure, and b) I was trapped with a woman who was selfish, and a manipulating leech. My mother kept me basically complacent, easy to use for my funds, and dependent on her and her alone. She played the ‘victim as a mother of an autistic child.’ Her ‘love’ was like a numbing illusion, shielding my eyes with a pinkish hue, keeping me captive to use my disability funds for her own enjoyment–leaving me to starve.

“I slowly saw the haze fade once I met Solomon at the young age of 16, and became closer around 18 to 19. We met at an anime con of all places, and he was the first ever person who didn’t treat me as stupid, weird, or annoying–as I am loud, laid back, and wear my heart on my sleeve. He was shy but kind, and the funny thing is? He bought me food and a plushie I had no money for because he could, a kindness I never got from any other person aside from teachers trying to coax me to go to school with good behaviour.

“The erasure of my own identity is still there, for one, I never got connected to my Metis/Mohican roots until I connected with my dad years later, and I never got connected to my nonbinary self until I met Solomon and learned what the LGBTQ really was. But now, I am confidently saying I am autistic, that I am nonbinary, and that I am Mohican on my dad’s side.”

You can see these same forces of erasure attack undesirable cultural identities, cultural identities that are too political and that challenge the homogenized west, whose capitalistic forces want us to be uniformed cogs in a machine.

The erasure of “Passing as Normal”

Passing, in the trans world, is a contentious term. Someone may want to pass for personal safety, gender euphoria, or both–it cannot be denied however, that in order to pass for cis, you have to conceal things that might give away your trans identity. In this sense, masking is very similar. Solomon masks for personal safety, to be able to keep jobs, to be able to retain most of his relationships–masking and passing are two sides of the same fucked up coin, the coin of not wanting to be seen as a freak.

“The passing of normal,” Daedric muses, “funny, I never once cared for being normal. I had the mentality of ‘I do what I want, when I want.’ Sure, I got bullied, sure, I got taken advantage of for being naive, but I never once felt the need to mask when I was a kid. Older however, well, now it happens unconsciously for me as I try to be quiet, laid back, and unbothered as I leave my comfort zone–the home I made for myself. I’ll admit, because I was never taught how to be disciplined, since my mother wanted an easy to use child–I didn’t see the dangers around me. I didn’t see a friend who had a crush on me turn out to be a scumbag, I didn’t see how manipulative my mother was, and I didn’t see the toxic crap until it was too late.

“Indifference for me is something that has haunted my core, it makes me quiet, afraid to speak out, trying to blend in with the background, trying to be unseen and left alone.”

For many people, however, there is a triple bind. If you are not part of homogenized whiteness there will certainly be parts of yourself you are encouraged to leave behind. In this sense, being of the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada puts Solomon in a hard to reconcile with position.

In many ways, his Ukrainianess and transmascness feel wrapped up together and targeted with similar forms of erasure. That perhaps sounds wild and out of nowhere–but we will explain.

Daedric adds, “I once spoke to my father about his heritage before, the Mohican–the Mohawk as he calls it. Essentially, he once told me that his grandparents were a part of the old residential schools, and almost lost their heritage. Meanwhile, I pretty much am learning about my own for the first time. I once learned, in high school, about the residential schools–that basically in Canada and the U.S.A, these residential schools were made to erase the Aboriginal identities–essentially integrating them into the White Man’s society.

“Because of what the White Man did to my people, we have a special holiday to remind the White Men of what they tried to erase. Also, this ‘holiday’ doesn’t do shit for us.”

In 2025, Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin described Ukrainians as “Russians who have traded their gender, their ethnicity, for an abstract, fictional, absurd alternative” and went further to say they are “collective transgenders.”

The article from RT International goes on to quote Dugin as saying “A male transgender does not become a woman. He becomes a freak. So does a Russian who imagines himself to be a Ukrainian.”

This idea of what a Ukrainian is or is not is not exclusive to the philosophers of Russia, a common name for Ukrainians in the west throughout the 20th century was “Ruthenian” which according to Michael Czuboka’s 1983 book Ukrainian Canadian, Eh? The Ukrainians of Canada and Elsewhere as Perceived by Themselves and Others was simply a Latinized form of “Russian.” Solomon feels the need to drive home that this is not just an abstract academic or philosophical talking point. Putin himself has claimed that “Russians and Ukrainians were one people” and claimed Ukraine to be an “artificial state.” In Solomon’s own personal life he has had family of friends and ex friends “challenge” his anger by telling him “Ukrainians are basically the same thing as Russians”–essentially treating “Ukrainian” as a new and politically motivated identity, it certainly cannot be one core to someone’s personhood–it is fake. Identity is fake.

Right?

So, what actually is identity?

Identity is a nebulous concept that changes over time. It is simply who you are, drawn from the experiences you carry and the names you are given. You can accept or reject parts of it–but in its truest form, identity is the labels you choose for yourself. Whatever your reasons may be. We live in a world that would extract everything from us and leave us with nothing, your identity is often the one thing you have true control over. When your identity goes against the norm, your life becomes a continuous battle to fight for the right to hold onto it, to those who have never had to fight for their identity, we all look like freaks.

Solomon aims to parallel the various facets of his identity in this essay, to show that his transness and his cultural background are not sperate and unrelated, but rather that they are entwined–as he is not a person in pieces, but a person whole.

Czuboka says this about Ukrainian identity in his aforementioned book:

“Although Ukrainians were called Ruthenians, Ruthenes, Rusins, Little Russians, Galicians, Bukovinians and Hutzuls at various times and in various places throughout history, they all belonged to a ‘nation’ in the truest sense of the word. Virtually all of them were Orthodox Christians until the late 16th century, when many of the Galician Ukrainians became Catholics. All Ukrainians spoke a common language that was considerably different from Polish and Russian. The customs, legends, arts, clothing, and musical traditions of all the Ukrainians were all exceptionally similar, whether they lived in territories controlled by Russia, by Poland, or by Austria. Thus, when Vera Lysenko chose Men in Sheepskin Coats as the title for her well-known book about Ukrainians, she did so because these coats were symbolic, in the sense that they were worn by Ukrainians in all parts of the Ukraine. In fact, the sheepskin coats of the Ukrainians were in themselves a kind of sub-conscious proclamation of nationhood.

“In the final analysis, however, the Ukraine became and has remained a nation, in an almost spiritual sense, because a population of closely related people believed that they were a nation. They knew they had originated from the same ancestors, with the same blood, language and culture, and they remembered that they had not always been serfs and slaves. They were determined that they would survive as a nation in spite of the tyranny of others who wanted to suppress and submerge them for their own selfish purposes.” (A/N: This book uses the rightfully contested article in front of Ukraine and Ukrainians for the sake of, as it puts it, historical accuracy. We do see the irony in Czuboka engaging in cultural preservation, and making these arguments whilst using a phraseology meant to undermine Ukrainian identity.)

In this sense, perhaps it is related to that Ukrainian culture that Solomon clings to his identities, and refuses to yield them to a greater culture that does not want him to have them, express them, or exist as such.

As a trans man, he has been called many names that do not apply to him, he has been assumed and encouraged to be what he is not. He grew up expressing himself as a tomboy–his parents always pressuring him to be more of a lady. That obviously did not work out so well. He came out as trans twice, more or less. The first time he came out as trans he received so much pushback and discouragement that he ended up re-closeting himself. He was asked, “Why can’t you just be a masculine woman?” Or told that, “so many young women want to be men because of internalized misogyny.” People refused, at the time, to use a masculine name for him (there are people who still refuse to do so.)

In much the same way that Ukrainians are Ukrainian because they believe themselves to be–Solomon is a man because he believes himself to be. His masculinity is core to his personhood, how he expresses himself, how he navigates the world. He cannot simply pretend to be a woman again, and nor can he simply pretend not to be trans, his transness too is part of him.

With both Ukrainianness and transmasculinity, there is no room to exist without being lumped into a “more accepted” identity. With being Ukrainian Solomon is encouraged to accept that he is “basically Russian” or he is encouraged to just see himself as “Canadian” (though being Ukrainian Canadian carries its own history, mind you)–but there is no room to be Ukrainian or Ukrainian diaspora. They are a “fake” category, a “political identity”, not a people unto themselves. Transmasculine people are either “basically the same as women” or “basically the same as cis men”–they are also never allowed to exist in their own territory, with their own identity, experiences and history.

Daedric examines their own relationship with the concept of identity:

“Identity to me, well it’s something I feel deep in my core. I do have my fair share of trauma, as I get iffy about cabs since a cab driver decided it was okay to kiss a young 15 year old while offering McDonalds and 20 bucks, he said, ‘It was practice for my girlfriend.’ What a load of bull, right? I immediately spoke up and even turned in the money when I could’ve kept quiet and used it for food, since my mother never fed me much. The identity I had as a high schooler was ‘Stay quiet, do some work, worry about your mother doing two jobs back to back, and hold back the emotions.’ But in that moment I felt the wrongness of that cab driver, I had to take action.

“My mother plays a huge part of who I am. As an 8th grade graduate, with only four months of 8th grade under my belt mind you, she wanted me, her ‘daughter’ to wear a dress, or a pretty skirt–but I said no, skirts and dresses make me feel uncomfortable. She wouldn’t budge unless I said ‘Fine, I’ll wear a dress like shirt and floral pants with a little bit of makeup and my hair done.’ I was then later, during high school, told by a shitty ex whose brother is in prison that, ‘My bro looked over your Facebook, said you looked super cute in that black and red shirt.’ It made me feel the ick–his 23 year old brother, a criminal, was lusting after a 14 to 15 year old. Yeah, yikes, right?

“Anyway, because of my ex’s shitty talk of ‘I’d kill myself if you died or ever left me, and my grandma hates you, but I love you.’ Along with, ‘My grandma knows we had sex, I told her.’ Dude, shut up! That was private, as I was a dumb 16 year old teen who was curious! My mom even found the condom you forgot to throw away! Anyway, so because of him, plus a lot of creepy crap–like a six year old trying to molest four year old me (My dad told me this story later in life, my big brother protected me from that. Thanks, big bro!), and someone following me when I was 20–waiting on a friend to go see a movie, but never showed.

“So, yeah, identity. It’s been basically one, big, fat dish rag for me. One minute I thought I knew who I was, the next–poof, gone.”

Under these circumstances, we must examine passing once more, and why people feel pressured to be unseen, to blend in.

Passing as a means of survival

Growing up, Solomon assumed his father’s side of the family was much smaller than it actually is. He learned in his 20s that the reason so few people carry the Skalozub name in Canada is not because his family is especially small, but rather it is because the majority of his ancestors who came from Ukraine changed their surnames to more English sounding ones. It made him realise that he comes from a family line of especially stubborn Ukrainians who simply refused to bury that part of themselves. It made him realise how selfish it was of him to feel any sort of embarrassment or shyness about carrying that name because peers his age made fun of it. And, in regards to being trans, he realised he needs to wear that same stubbornness on his sleeve–the world can mock you, but it cannot force you to throw parts of yourself away.

Passing, however, isn’t always something that righteous stubbornness can stand up against. Solomon still needs to mask his ADHD in most social contexts–this too is a form of “passing.” The reason he needs to do this is because he cannot afford to be unemployed. Many of his ancestors and extended family changed their names to “pass” for Anglo-Saxon Canadians as a means to secure employment. He needs to, to some extent, “pass” as not trans in various social contexts, generally for safety and in prior cases, also for employment. In his most recent bout of needing to find a job quickly, he had his deadname on his resume, as well as his preferred name. Solomon not hiding his transness, plus his visibly androgynous appearance whilst dropping off resumes certainly did not earn him many callbacks.

The more someone cannot pass for a “normal cisgender person of homogenized whiteness” under capitalist western society the less likely they are to obtain and hold down employment–the less likely they are to be able to be financially secure and take care of themselves, let alone loved ones. (A/N: We by no means are pretending that capitalistic western society is the only society that ostracizes ethnic and racial minorities, mentally ill, and trans people. We are using labels that apply to the society we live under–but understand and know that these social issues are part and parcel with any society that upholds central wealth and power.)

Thomas Page McBee writes about the concept of passing in his 2018 book: Amateur, A True Story About What Makes a Man. He makes a direct comparison between racial and ethnic minorities passing as white and trans people passing as cis:

“In the broadest sense, [Allyson] Hobbs told me, passing exists because we categorize bodies into social binaries, there is usually a reward (economic, social) and a price (family, community, identity) to crossing over to the ‘other’ side. ‘Part of what makes passing so much about loss is that the stakes become really high,’ she said, noting that you ‘have to have the binary’ for passing to become a meaningful strategy.”

Later in the same chapter he writes:

“It is not easy to face the long shadow of assimilation in the United States, which is as old as the nation itself; in fact, James Baldwin referred to the refusal of ‘all other ties’ and ‘any other history’ as ‘the making of an American.’ It is so much a part of our national history to pretend to be what we are not in our striving that many of us no longer see what we have lost.”

While not everyone can pass for the accepted majority, we are certainly incentivized to get as close as possible. If you are mentally ill you cannot “act it”–you cannot become an “inconvenience to others.” If you are trans you must try to not be like “those trans people”–you know the ones, the blue haired SJWs that get featured in out of context clips in cringe compilations. And if you are any kind of ethnic, racial and/or cultural minority, you cannot be too loud about it–blending in is key to not being socially ostracized.

There was another section in Czuboka’s book that struck home with Solomon:

“Some Ukrainians try to hide their identities entirely. The author, for example, once knew a tall, blue-eyed and fair-haired gentleman by the name of ‘Roberts.’ He looked like a ‘typical’ Anglo-Saxon, but betrayed his real identity with a rather thick Ukrainian accent. Although born in Canada, Roberts had obviously grown up in a Ukrainian district where he had picked up many Ukrainian mannerisms in speaking English.

“Roberts was a ‘closet Ukrainian.’ He was apparently ashamed of his origin, and felt that his blue eyes and blond hair would allow him to pass for ‘white.’ Sometimes, in an indirect manner, he would make whimsical and vague comments about his origin, but he never felt free to confess his true identity. He was trapped in an ethnic no-man’s-land of his own making.

“Myrna Kostash has provided us with another example of this phenomenon. In October, 1976, Saturday Night magazine published an article called ‘Baba was a Bohunk’ by Ms. Kostash, in which the author admitted that: ‘When I was a girl, I had been embarrassed by my ethnic origin. ‘Greek’, I would say to my friends, ‘I’m Greek’, unwittingly reproducing an hierarchy of undesirables in which, to my mind at least, Greeks were less undesirable than Ukrainians. I would have said I was German, if I could have gotten away with it.’

“Like many religious, political and ethnic converts, Myrna Kostash now wears her ethnic heart on her sleeve, and has confessed her innermost feelings.”

This will be a surprise to very few readers, but Solomon was an outcast growing up. He was outcasted for many reasons, his poor masking of his ADHD being one, his social awkwardness as a closeted queer and trans kid another–but there was the triple bind as well. He had a, according to his peers, unpronounceable surname, and sometimes the way he pronounced certain words “sounded funny.” He became something of a vocal chameleon, talking like his classmates so they wouldn’t make fun of his “funny sounding voice” and referring to his baba and gido as simply “my grandparents” to avoid further teasing for using “funny sounding words.”

He too, in a sense became a “closet-Ukrainian” as a young adult–but the rug would be pulled from under him more often than he liked. He would be asked if he was Russian or if he knew Russian by people who picked up on his (incredibly mild) accent. He would have to give the origins of his surname away, because strangers would ask “what kind of name is that?” in an often puzzled tone. He would even have people look him over and say “I know a Ukrainian when I see one” as though there were features that he couldn’t hide if he wanted to. To this day, whilst he wears it on his sleeve, he still tenses up when he gets questions about his surname, or if someone quizzically stares at him and asks “what kind of accent is that?” the moment he sounds a bit too much like his baba and gido.

Coming to terms with his identity, realising that he didn’t always need to “pass” was a similar process in the case of the multiple facets of who he is. He started drawing and writing about transmasculine characters, he started allowing himself to integrate Ukrainian culture and folklore into his fiction, he started engaging in trans communities, he started learning Ukrainian and engaging with Ukrainian art, he started engaging with writing about ADHD and mental illness, he started allowing himself to talk about his ADHD, anxiety and history of mental illness–he started allowing himself to be a full human and not just a reflection of what the world around him wanted him to be.

Daedric expands on their relationship with identity and passing:

“I’ll admit, I don’t pass at all. I am indifferent to people calling me ‘miss’, I just ignore it and move on with my day, but that is also a form of passing to survive–where you don’t pass enough but are trapped in the pronouns and body you don’t want and have to use that to basically be a part of the norm. I wear baggy clothes because I hate my body, sometimes I get mistaken for a boy, but mostly by people who don’t look too hard.

“I’ve been told multiple times, ‘you gotta put in the work to get your ideal body,’ by friends I care about, however here’s the thing–I’m lazy, and not wanting to lose my armour, because if I start working out, eating more, and taking T (yes I am trans, but mostly nonbinary with a transmasc identity) I’d probably get more scorn, scrutiny and bull I do not wanna deal with. I’m a passive person at best, and if someone corners me, and if I can’t just basically ignore it, I lash out, I screech, I run. Not my best, but my past has shaped me to use womanhood as armour, even if this armour can be dangerous to use.”

How do we stop wearing these costumes?

“How to stop wearing the costume.” Daedric begins their conclusion, “Those words to me, well–if I can shed my armour, I would. But the fear of judgement, scorn, creepy people, and more keep me held back.

“I’ve seen the effects of T, and the effects of working out and eating right, but if I try–what if I get creeps coming after me, wanting to use me? Or worse, use my body for their own pleasure? I’m someone who hates confrontation and touch, I’d run, I’d get stressed, I’d just break. But the only person who can stand up and fix my own situation is me. I have to be the solution to start it, but please, can people just stop with the bigotry, the homophobia, the transphobia, and the racism? The erasure in general? Is that too much to ask? To hope for?”

Solomon often perceives himself as a nebulous being, a being who wears different masks and costumes for the various social situations he finds himself in. He quickly learns which side of him people around him prefer, what is preferred at his places of employment–he learns who he has to be to keep his partner provided for, who he has to be to keep his friends happy–and in all of this, he wonders who he is, and if he will truly get to a point where who he is is enough. When do we get to stop wearing these silly masks and these silly costumes?

When do we all get to stop this and simply exist as our truest selves?

In Franklyn S. Newton’s 2024 novel Synthetic Sea, there is an intimate scene between the main character, Ryoma, and his love interest–a nonbinary synthetic human named Guin. Guin wears pieces over their body that enable them to pass for having a biological body–ostensibly that allows them to pass for what is accepted as a human. In this scene they remove those pieces and show their true body to Ryoma, a “…beautifully arranged fabric of multi-colour circuits and wires, the hardware woven together beneath a transparent casing. Something like glass tinted a pale grey-purple, like an overcast morning.”

This is arguably the most intimate and vulnerable scene in the novel. Synthetic humans are not entirely seen as human, they are hunted down and their bodies are used against their will to extract knowledge about how their technology works for the proposes of stealing that information to give to a corporation. Guin, in a very literal sense, no longer cares about passing, or wearing any sort of mask, in this moment.

The social function of erasure is to punish us into burying those undesirable traits of ourselves, to force us to fit into the shape of a cog that keeps the capitalist clock turning. It is the function of making us into “productive members of society,” but truly–if we can alter our social situations, then we can remove our masks and our costumes.

If we, within our means and our own social circles, can create safety nets and openness and acceptance for those the least able to pass as the accepted majority–then in the end, none of us will have to pass. We will simply be able to exist.

Cited sources:

Ukrainians are ‘collective transgenders’–Dugin, 2025, RT ( https://rt-english.com/russia/615515-ukrainians-collective-transgenders-dugin/ )

Why did Putin’s Russia invade Ukraine? 2026, Paul Kirby ( https://rt-english.com/russia/615515-ukrainians-collective-transgenders-dugin/ )

Ukrainian Canadian, Eh? The Ukrainians of Canada and Elsewhere as Perceived by Themselves and Others, 1983, Michael Czuboka

Amateur, A True Story About What Makes a Man, 2018, Thomas Page McBee

Synthetic Sea, 2024, Franklyn S. Newton

Bibliography:

Dis/ability/gender: Figuring gender through disablism and ablism, 2026, Tenderly Borderline ( https://tenderlyborderline.substack.com/p/disabilitygender-figuring-gender?r=2kwb95&utm_medium=ios )

Writing Ukraine, 2024, Myrna Kostash

Nimona, 2015, ND Stevenson