Outside the Desire Economy: Letters from the Threshold

These letters were written between two Dharma friends — trans Zen practitioners and Dharma siblings — both living in the wake of botched surgeries, each grappling in their own way with the intersections of embodiment, grief, and desire. What follows is my side of that conversation.

Letter One: The Wound Opens

Hey —

Following up from our conversation. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. Our conversation felt resonant, and also it emotionally filleted me.

After we spoke, I went out to eat and broke down crying mid-dinner. Then I cry-walked my way home. There was something about what you said about feeling desired that went straight in and stirred up all the subterranean grief.

When I started transitioning, I stopped being desired by other people, especially after shaving my head and having top surgery. It felt like stepping out of one prison of gender only to find myself stepping into another one. I went from being desired because I aligned closely enough with the beauty standards — the measure of worth I was taught to adhere to — to not being desired at all. Because as far as the world is concerned, I’m now seen as an ugly woman.

It’s strange to feel a little freer in myself, and also obsolete. Like something in me is both expanding and disappearing at the same time.

Even if I learn to see myself as beautiful and whole in my fracturedness, and I do feel like I’m coming to that, the heartbreak and the grief is that I don’t expect anyone else to.

I’m grieving touch and the experience of being wanted. I can see a part of me letting it die. I don’t know if it’s resignation or acceptance — it’s hard to tell. It’s not that I don’t want to want, or to be wanted. It’s still in me, deep in the tissues somewhere. It just feels impossible to imagine that anyone else could appreciate crooked beauty in the same way I do.

In my lifetime, I haven’t seen that kind of appreciation from people. Or if it exists, it stops short, reserved for objects, not for bodies. We’ll marvel at the worn and perfect — the weathered doorway, the handwoven tapestry, the dried flowers that still hold their color. We’ll even praise the blown glass with its tiny imperfections, because it proves a real human being made it.

But somehow that aesthetic principle never seems to reach flesh. We narrow it. We stop it at the threshold of the body. So long as the body is pristine, right?

And I continue on every day, being other people’s favorite emotional support eunuch — softly nourishing, holding, tending — and at the same time grieving the absence of care, the lopsidedness of affection. I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of the historical eunuch lately, and realizing how often I find myself playing it, endlessly attuned, indispensable, and yet somehow outside the circle of touch.

You’re right, somehow, putting this all into words — just saying it out loud, writing it — makes it feel better, even though the sharpest parts of it can’t be languaged. At least it can leave my body a little.

Thanks for hearing this.

Letter Two: The Wound Begins to Transmute

Maybe one day, when we’re not so thick in the processing, we can start a group or something for people who’ve experienced this.

I read somewhere that the historical eunuch alchemizes the wound. I think it’s possible we might as well. For now, or at least tonight, I’ll be dancing my way to surrender and the Holy Spirit to the soulful sounds of Nina Simone, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Big Mama Thornton, because right now I’m in too much pain for anything else but shaking and jumping.

1. The Wound as Threshold

A wound — whether physical, emotional, or existential — breaks continuity. It interrupts what was whole, familiar, or unquestioned.

For the eunuch, that wound was literal: the body marked by castration. But symbolically, it represents a radical separation from ordinary human participation — reproduction, lineage, social identity, power as it’s usually conceived.

In mythic terms, this wound opens a threshold, a passage between worlds. Once marked, one can no longer fully belong to the ordinary realm, but neither are they entirely apart from it. This in-between state can become a site of seeing differently.

2. From Deprivation to Revelation

The loss of something essential — sexual potency, voice, belonging, innocence, love — can, paradoxically, cultivate inner sight.

When an outer capacity is cut off, the psyche sometimes compensates by developing depth perception inwardly. It’s as if the energy that once flowed outward is redirected toward the soul’s interior.

Many mystics, artists, and wounded healers describe this:

• The blind prophet Tiresias, punished yet granted vision.

• Chiron, the wounded healer whose incurable pain opens his wisdom.

• The castrati singers, whose voices became ethereal, transcending the human register.

• Or in psychological terms, those who transform trauma into empathy or creative insight.

The eunuch, in this sense, becomes a seer through absence — someone whose deprivation sharpens sensitivity to what others overlook.

3. The Alchemy of Loss

In alchemical language, the wound is the nigredo — the blackening that precedes illumination. It destroys false wholeness, forcing a descent into the underworld of what has been denied or severed.

Through that descent, vision is born: not the sight of the eyes, but of the heart or spirit.

When a person truly metabolizes loss — rather than bypassing or romanticizing it — something new becomes possible: compassion, presence, attunement to the invisible. The wound becomes an organ of perception.

4. Applied to the Eunuch Archetype

Historically and symbolically, the eunuch embodies service born of renunciation — a channel for power, wisdom, or spirit that arises because of what was taken or surrendered.

They dwell between worlds, and that liminality allows them to see the truth of both.

Their wound — the loss of conventional manhood and lineage — becomes a mirror for seeing systems of power, desire, and dependence with unflinching clarity.

It also grants access to a form of love not bound by reproduction or possession — a love that witnesses, tends, and transforms.

And yet, as I sit with all this, I realize that the eunuch archetype only goes so far. The eunuch was granted vision after the loss of power — but I never had that kind of power to begin with. Those assigned male at birth could be stripped of privilege and made liminal, yes, but those of us assigned female at birth were born already peripheral to power. What happens when you never had access to that center, when the wound isn’t a loss of privilege but an intensification of absence?

In my case, I renounced the costume of desirability itself — the long hair, the soft curve, the breasts, the symbols that made me legible as a “beautiful woman.” I didn’t step into manhood or become transmasculine; I didn’t reach for power within the system that wounded me. I simply stepped out of it. I removed what was expected of me without replacing it with what might have granted new privilege. And that is a different kind of exile — not a transition from one social category to another, but a renunciation of the entire structure of legibility.

So I feel like I’m living a version of the eunuch’s story through the loss of desirability, but without the social recognition or mythic category that holds it. The eunuch could be made sacred because he once belonged to the hierarchy; I, on the other hand, step further outside it and find almost no archetype waiting. It’s a kind of erasure for which there isn’t even a name. Still, the impulse to alchemize remains — to work with what’s here, to turn this unnamed grief into vision, to let it teach me how to see and love differently.

Letter Three: The Mind Integrates and Speaks from Clarity

Good morning.

I really appreciate what you shared about your relationship to your body. There’s so much tenderness in what you said, and I know how layered that terrain can be, especially when the world keeps teaching us to see our bodies as sites of transaction rather than presence.

What you said has me thinking a lot about the economics of desirability — how so much of what gets desired is what’s been made marketable, consumable, or legible inside a particular gaze. I used to be desired because I closely aligned with the beauty standards for women. That’s really it. And all the while, on the inside, I felt like something else entirely. The more I was desired for those things, the less I felt seen or loved.

When I degendered myself, I thought I’d finally be desired for me — that the people who would eventually desire me would do so not because I checked boxes, but because they actually saw me. That never really happened. That’s not to say I’m not noticed. I get stopped in the street pretty regularly, stared at almost everywhere I go. People often remark on my aesthetic and praise it, while also casting me as a novelty, which denies my tender humanity.

I’m seen as mythic now, which, in some ways, I am. But it puts me close to the figure of the historical eunuch: intimate with beauty and power, yet set apart from the ordinary currents of desire. People benefit from my growth, my liberation, my sovereignty, my willingness to live outside the desire economy. They’re inspired by it, maybe even changed by proximity to it. But there’s something extractive about that dynamic too — how the world still feeds on what I’ve had to alchemize just to exist, while keeping me outside the exchange itself. It’s as if my transformation nourishes others, but I’m not allowed to be touched by the warmth of what I generate.

Sometimes I notice how, in dynamics with feminine people, I end up being the one who’s expected to desire — the one who reaches — while they remain positioned as the one who’s desired, fulfilling all their unmet childhood longings to be seen and loved. This reminds me a lot of cisgender men I’ve worked with, especially as a pro-dom, how much they craved to be desired, how it was a wound so deep they couldn’t even articulate it. How much they wanted to be wanted, to know that they have value somehow within the social-relational fabric of things. That their being here on Earth isn’t trivial. That they’re wanted here. Their whole being, their whole self, through and through, is desired.

Anyway, I find myself sitting in the paradox of liberation. I keep coming back to it. Once you demarket yourself, there’s immense freedom, but also deep loneliness. The question becomes, how do I remain sovereign without being exiled? How do I invite desire that’s devotional rather than transactional?

Our bodies are so permeable, impermanent, aging — these organic things so far outside our control. We try to domesticate them, dominate them, get them to fit some white-supremacist model of perfection. But what if they could be wild, and phenomenal in their wildness, and still desired? Wanted on this Earth. Wanted with other bodies. Even in their raw naturalness.

And as I’m ending this, I’m sitting here with this beautiful boy cat who’s found me and curled up beside me, nudging his little head under my hand, insisting on being pet — like he has no qualms about being desired, about being doted on, about receiving affection. He’s so in his naturalness, so forthcoming in his quiet entitlement, his right to be loved up on. There’s something in that I’m learning from.