Sleep Paralysis: Queer Dispatches from the Frontlines of a Late Capitalist Pandemic

By Talija Kazimira / Winter 2023

Content Warning: Queerphobia and mention of a slur. Names of individuals are changed for privacy.

“It’s not that bad,” my dad would say angrily, the mantra he would repeat whenever I was struggling with isolation. I was just starting to form a friend group at community college, and then all of a sudden the coronavirus pandemic hit and I was separated from them. I wasn’t able to keep up my friendship with them after that happened. I had my old friends from LA that I talked to over text and video chat, but I could never see them in person. I couldn’t see anyone in person at all. I’d spend many of the hours each day daydreaming about finding connection with others, agonizing over loneliness, and framing the thoughts in my head as if they were dialogues with others who’d be willing to listen, clinging to that fantasy of a person for comfort.

My dad said I simply was not putting enough effort into making connections. The world was out there, go outside, he’d tell me. But there was coronavirus. It wasn’t safe to interact with people too much. Moreover, with everything closed or partially closed, there wasn’t much of an environment to facilitate meeting new people. I was destined to be alone for however long this quarantine lasted.

We followed the quarantine almost religiously. One of the major arguments my parents had during the quarantine was about this one instance where my mom went to the corner store to restock on makeup. Since this was, in covid-speak, nonessential, my dad was furious that she potentially exposed us to the virus for this.

Not all of San Diego County was as devoted as we were to this ritual.

“Please put on a mask,” the cashier said timidly.

“Fuck you. I’ll fight you! Faggot.”

The man’s large, meaty hands punched the thin clear screen separating him and the Seven Eleven employee; originally created to block respiratory droplets, and now introduced to the new role of blocking the rage of the public.

His tirade continued. My dad’s finger was on the pepper spray, ready to strike.

* * *

The emptiness of online communication was exhausting. It felt unreal at times, like I could get the same stimulation, the noises of human beings, from just watching YouTube or something. It didn’t have the same, irreplaceable feeling of in-person interaction.

Not everyone seemed to feel this way, however. Some of my friends who were very isolated or asocial already didn’t notice; their lifestyle did not change that much, after all. Others were happy that they now had more free time. “Quarantine is great, I just get to jack off and play videogames all day,” some of them thought. Fucking idiots, I thought.

But the truth is, I wasn’t just mad that they seemed to be so casual about a world-changing catastrophe. I was jealous that they were able to tolerate this thing which was so intolerable for me, which from even the first week was already driving me crazy. The fact that there were people who got through this situation unscathed, and who even thrived in it, surprised and infuriated me. Later I would think about the ways I thrived in it but also the huge price it came with, what I traded in for it. The quarantine forced us to face ourselves more than ever before. I gained more pieces of the person I wanted to be, but through the trauma I lost the ability to appreciate them.

There was a time when I thought I’d trade anything to erase that year. I’d trade the love I came to feel for my best friend during that time, the introspection I did, all the changes I made, all of it.

It became a regular occurrence, ever since around April of that year, that I would wake up at 3 am with dreadful thoughts about the future. I would have this terror like I was dying, because my breath was getting very thin. It felt like I was being choked. I tried to kick myself awake to confirm I was still alive. A few times I even got sleep paralysis. It felt like my lungs were caving in, being crushed, that if I didn’t move instantly, I would die. But I couldn’t move. My body was frozen, as if already dead, just waiting for my mind to catch up with it.

Fever or chills. Cough. Shortness of breath. Difficulty breathing.

“You don’t. Have. Fucking. Coronavirus! Stop worrying about everything,” said the tyrannical father. This was a common theme. I was always worrying too much, he said.

* * *

It’s not always super obvious. Sometimes it comes in subtle ways— the weird looks people give when someone mentions trans issues, the sighs in a classroom when a professor mentions the existence of nonbinary people, the preemptive defense: “I support trans people, but…”, and more. Sometimes it comes in more overt ways. Conservatives claim they want to end the alleged “mutilation” of transgender children, dispel the myths of “gender ideology”, and end the “gender nonsense” that children are supposedly being indoctrinated into. This is the kind of ideology that motivates people to bring heavy weaponry to drag brunches, and to clap for the increasingly genocidal speeches of the Trump 2024 campaign.

My dad had his own philosophy on the so-called “gender ideology” ravaging our nation.

“Yeah, my friend Randy’s husband was a transgender man, and it was obvious that she was too. I could tell she was really a woman… because she acted like a fucking bitch.”

* * *

Smart TVs, smart refrigerators, smart cars, smart homes, and even smart vibrators, complete with synchronization to one’s favorite music or podcast.

The bourgeois like these inventions; they don’t suffer from the consequences of surveillance. Of course, that’s what this Internet of Things is all about— data extraction, profit. Sold in the name of efficiency, of a modern aesthetic, increasingly dumb inventions that at times do nothing at all to even increase efficiency, but give the appearance of doing so.

One time I was at a restaurant at UCSD and I saw a soda machine where instead of a button you push to get the soda, there was a little touchscreen that you push to pour it, which is functionally the same thing. It just made me laugh at how absurd the idea of creating it was.

It’s part of a machine, a mentality of increasing efficiency. And it’s the way we are molded in the schools and institutions we grow up with. My friend pointed out to me that regardless of my beliefs, the way I live is very capitalist. I’m easily addicted to the algorithm, I’m always living not in the present but in the future, rushing from one task to the next. The way I eat looks painful to her, and I even brush my teeth at an industrial pace. I obsessively categorize things I do based on how productive they are, and even when I’m doing “productive” things, I perpetually feel like I’m wasting time. I always feel like I’m losing time. Time, time, time. The thing always on my mind, never a servant to me, always a master. I tell myself that I’m content with this, that I chose this. I know the machine is bad. But I chose this for me. This is different, I tell myself.

But you can’t just change what you know about something, you have to change your habits so they don’t reflect the machine. In other words, to borrow from a famous quote, you have to kill the capitalist in your head.

Even in the language learning community, a place I love to spend time in, a place where we learn a thing that is fundamentally about community—even there, people are susceptible to this mentality. Educational videos abound with titles like “How to ABSORB textbooks like a SPONGE” or “I became FLUENT in Spanish in just one MONTH”. The online communities I joined were very competitive, and often when people asked grammar questions they’d be met with the most pretentious of linguistics debates or with people trying to give the answer that made them sound the smartest rather than the one that was the most helpful. This one person even sent an article to someone asking for help that was written in such technical, academic Japanese that it was practically all Kanji (for reference, Japanese usually has a balance of Kanji pictographs and its other, more simple writing system, the Kana).

* * *

I’m stuck online again. It’s post-pandemic, or at least “post-” in the sense that we’re now pretending it doesn’t exist. I always have to correct myself when I use phrases like “during covid, I did…”— as if covid isn’t still a thing. I just keep forgetting. I wear the mask. I try to stay out of crowds. I know the pandemic is still raging on and getting worse by the minute. But since in our collective ideology we have forgotten it, in my language I automatically go to past tense.

But yes, in this moment I’m stuck online. Even though I’ve been released from quarantine. Even though the outside is there, no longer a rare commodity.

“You feel stuck in the wrong body. You feel this disconnect between yourself and your appearance. That sounds like a mental illness,” said a trans acquaintance of mine in the group chat.

“Being trans isn’t a mental illness,” I protested.

“The experience is excessively painful, just like mental illness.” he replied.

“It’s harmful because of gender roles imposed on people and transphobia. Without that, being trans wouldn’t be all that inconvenient. You would just transition with less social and medical barriers.”

“I’m pretty sure trans people would still be deeply uncomfortable with their bodies even if transphobia didn’t exist,” someone else added.

“It’s both unpleasant and a mental phenomenon, therefore mental illness,” another person added.

“It’s not a mental illness!” I insisted.

“Why does the word ‘mental illness’ make you recoil?” he asked.

Why? Is he seriously asking me that? Why does a label that has outcasted me so many times from normal society make me recoil? Why do I recoil also at pathologizing queer identities?

Sometimes I hate the discourse on gender. Which parts are biology, which parts are socially constructed. Whether our divergent genders are a gift or a curse. The picture is incomplete. There is no one theory that can explain why we exist, any more than a theory can explain why a particular person is gay or straight. They just are.

* * *

Why do we keep creating things that will make us obsolete? Even the people creating them seem to be aware of this threat, speaking in their interview about their projects with nervous excitement. The same people working to expand the field of AI seem to always be warning about how it’s going to change everything for the worse. Spelling their own doom from morbid curiosity. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Why do they not see that?

But I think about the abominations that I could participate in if I went into the tech field, to use my linguistics degree to pervert language. I think about how amusing it would be to see how far those limits can be pushed, like a chemist starting explosive reactions for the sheer awe of seeing the destruction unfold. This must be how many of these people start out. Isolated, curious, fixated on their craft without an ethical code to back it, and, most importantly, caring only about their own profit or the profit of some soulless corporation.

One day, while I was sucked into the algorithm, into the trends again, I purchased this AI art generator app that everyone was raging about on Instagram to create digital portraits based on their face. Most of them turned out really pretty, but a few were malformed, and I discarded those ones. Among the new selection, I was mesmerized by how accurately it captured my face and even my personality.

“Bad idea. This is how they get us [queer people],” my friend said to me.

“I mean my face is probably already in a database somewhere,” I said, trying to justify my decision.

“No, I’m serious,” she replied.

The longer I stared at the images, the more bland they started to look. They invoked no emotional reaction in me. They lacked some essential humanity. They lacked the knowledge that a human being created it. They lacked the flaws and roughness that tell you someone physically made it with their hands or mind. The flaws that do exist look extremely artificial, like a printer messing up photos.

“AI art, more like AI thievery,” one of my friend says.

“It’s inevitable. The same algorithms responsible for it are used for so many other important things. You’re not gonna stop it,” my other friend said to her.

“Yeah, okay,” she scoffed.

Hearing that conversation made me want to delete the photos I created. I felt shame for wasting twelve dollars contributing to this mess.

* * *

The cliché metaphor cisgender people often give to describe the trans experience is to be a “woman trapped in a man’s body”, they say. But there are also times when I feel like a very scared man occupying a woman’s body, or a newly female body. I think back to all those years I spent as a man not knowing why I was so miserable, so helpless, and scared, and I think about how those are 20 years I can never get back, still a part of me, one that occupies less space inside this body as I go on, but still there. I have trouble loving myself, but somehow it is easier to want to comfort this other me because he looked so different, and felt so different, and was almost a different person. It makes me really sad thinking what he went through. I often wish I could feel the same empathy for myself in the present tense, but alas, unless I could see her in third-person, I wouldn’t.

* * *

Even the most sophisticated algorithms have our human biases in them, sometimes more so than we can even consciously realize. So algorithms, among many other things, can be racist. I imagine if this monstrous new internet we’re creating had some sort of soul, if sentient AI is truly possible, what it would look like. A sentient AI with all of our dreams, hopes, fantastical creations, and spirit, but also with all of our hate, bigotry, conflict, and our own death drive, the stuff that seems to rise to the top of the wastebin of social media. I imagine it, this hypothetical invention of the future, as some sort of superintelligent fascist, a beast crumbling under its own weight with all of our biases and hatreds, constructed in the name of growth and objectivity, yet filled with the most irrational of feelings, a mirror showing us desires we didn’t even know we had, and were better off not knowing we did.

Art and writing are uniquely human endeavors. A machine that spits out something that mimics human language is not really using language, it is using a copy of it, what Noam Chomsky calls “high-tech plagiarism” (Chomsky, 2023). An essay generated by ChatGPT is just like an image generated by an AI that analyzes and mimics the uncompensated work of real artists— a copy of a copy, not even language or art anymore, but just a collection of signs. How did we get to see even using language at all as a chore? To want to put it in a machine and have it spit out what we no longer want to write ourselves?

It makes me sad to see any language disrespected. To see endangered languages. To see languages overly-lexified by English to keep up with our so-called “international” language. No language has enough merit to have such dominance, to be part of both a physical and a linguistic colonization and erasure of cultures. That title, that place at the top, belongs to no language, and to no man.

* * *

I think, about the industrial mentality that is imposed on our own transness with the idea of “passing”, some ethereal, perfect concept of a gender that is impossible to conform to. It may be common for cis women to have thin eyebrows, little facial hair, and smoother jawlines, for example, but these traits are a statistical average. A woman may be all of the “womanly” traits, none of them, or some combination thereof, but it is impossible to construct a completely coherent category of “man” or “woman”. There is so much variation; even cis people who look “incorrect” in regards to their gender are de-manned or de-womaned, wrongly put into a category that goes against their identity. Someone with every single trait of “male” and “female” would look uncanny, unnaturally perfect. It reminds me of celebrities who get excessive plastic surgery. It’s almost an attempt to realize, with vast money and resources, the most “perfect” ideal of womanhood or manhood, one that lacks the humanity of men, women, and everyone in between, or outside, these genders.

There was a time when I used to analyze photos of my face for how “clockable” they were, for how “mannish” they looked. Now when I remember that I used to do that, I find it such a weird concept, which is good, because it is a sign that it’s becoming unfamiliar, that it’s a part of me that occupies less space, that I haven’t thought like that in a long time.

Some dysphoria has to be inherent. While it’s not universal, almost every trans person I know describes experiencing it. But we also have to question the ideologies that increase our dysphoria, our scrutiny of our bodies, that motivate us to get plastic surgery to look more “passable”. I don’t think it’s our natural state to be this critical of ourselves. The proof is how tolerable my dysphoria is around people who accept me, and how much it rages out of control around people who don’t.

Not only was I obsessed with passing, I was part of the problem at times. Despite the politics I claimed, some of my words would seem to suggest otherwise.

“No, I don’t go out in a skirt without shaving my legs. I don’t wanna look like a freak.”

“She said he was transphobic to her? She’s probably making it up cause she is the type that’s really sensitive.”

“She’s one of those types of trans people.”

* * *

We’re part of neighborhoods, cities, and even perhaps a world community. But the machine atomizes us in a way that makes us forget that (Twohig, 2021), to make it seem, as Margaret Thatcher said, that “[t]here is no society”, only “individual men and women.” If you don’t belong to a community, all you belong to is the received corporate American culture. You belong the machine of production that says endless work must continue even during a world-ending pandemic, that turns even your own home, once a haven from work, into a unit of production, so the machine can be continued remotely, that says that you must be the perfect ideal of a gender to be socially recognized. And you must be seeking perfection. The perfect education, the perfect job, the perfect partner, the perfect house, the perfect vacation, the perfect body, perfect mental health. All the time. Never to rest. To even brush your teeth at an industrial pace.

Works Cited

Chomsky, Noam. EduKitchen. “Chomsky on ChatGPT, Education, Russia and the unvaccinated.”

Twohig, Niall. Issuu. “Seeing the Self in Context.”