João Guimaraes interviewing Linh Dinh (part 3)

[Philadelphia on 10/7/12]

You mock transgender people in some of your recent Substack posts. Why do that? What is it about this community that you are against? Your poetry and literary work overall radiates empathy, tolerance and comradery, to a degree that is in effect more radical than what we find in the writings of other authors from your generation, so this positioning is quite shocking and disappointing to me. Do you not agree that trans people should be allowed to freely shape their bodies according to what they perceive their sexual identity to be—and be treated as any other man, woman or intersex person? 

-Of course, anyone must be allowed to do whatever he wants with his body, including not being injected with poison. What we’re witnessing and being subjected to is something else entirely. The trans movement is being imposed from the top, to benefit big pharma and big government while harming women, children and the autonomy of the family. Let’s consider how they’re promoting drag queens. These freaks are now seen on television shows in at least a dozen countries. As a subculture, drag queens are interesting and should be left alone to perform their freak shows, but why are they in kindergarten classes, with any objector condemned? So what if cross dressing has been around for thousands of years? So has torture, public execution and the raping of children.

First of, drag queens aren’t women but parodies or travesties of women. Even if castrated, they are still men posing as the most grotesque of women. I mean, just look at Alaska Thunderfuck, Trixie Mattel, Trinity The Tuck or Jiggly Caliente, etc. Even the most desperate incel wouldn’t want to sleep with any of them, because they’re not women! Only the sickest society can pretend they are.

This insult against women is also found with trans athletes, so we have a muscular freak like Lia Thomas outswimming actual women. If LeBron James, say, suddenly decides he’s a woman, should he allowed to compete against females, and share the same locker room with his penisless teammates? Each shower would be scarier than the opening scene of Carrie. In the best case, it’s a Burning Man climax, complete with biblical deluge and toxic mud.

In several American states, a prisoner can declare himself a transsexual and be transferred to a women’s jail. As a woman, would you want to be his cellmate? Actually, many would, to get pregnant.

Teenage American boys can now violate female spaces simply by changing their pronoun. If you fear having your 13-year-old daughter molested or raped in a locker room or bathroom at school, you’re transphobic, if not a Nazi. Relentlessly promoted by the corporate media and enforced by government, gender dysphoria has become an avalanching fad.

Even more atrocious is what’s done to kids by this trans agenda. With insidious drugs and irreversible surgeries not just readily available, but encouraged, children can damage their bodies permanently, even without their parents’ consent.

What I’m objecting to, then, is not anyone shaping his body freely, but the promotion of a very rare psychic condition, and the violation of women’s spaces and children’s minds. Worst, though, is the mutilation of kids who never had the space, time and freedom to properly mature into a man or woman. With countless obstacles along the way, it’s a huge challenge in itself. That’s why we see so many die without ever becoming human.

After decades of whispers, it’s finally acknowledged Obama was, and perhaps still is, a crack smoking homosexual. Though we shouldn’t care where Obama likes to stick his dick, it’s concerning that he kept up such a phony facade, and may have had knowing insiders killed. As with the trans agenda, it’s not what anyone does to or by himself we’re worried about, but deception, societal distortion and the harming of innocents.

Much of the West has become so insane, the very concept of a biological female is verboten, and extraordinarily long schlonged, bearded men are said to be capable of giving birth and breast feeding. Oops, I just committed a Nazi crime! I mean, chest feeding.

Look at what they’ve done to the language! A vagina is now a front hole. They’ve turned gorgeously petalled flowers into septic sewers. Sheela na gig must return to end this outrage.

The intersection of literature and sociocultural critique has always been a big aspect of your work, and from reading some of your interviews and previous work, I got the impression that you felt poetry was insufficient in articulating political commentary or somehow was incapable of instigating real change and awareness and accountability.  If that’s true, where does poetry go wrong in its ability for social or political commentary? Why is it limited and where do its capabilities end? Also, what can prose do in that regard that poetry cannot, if anything at all?

-First off, poetry is slow reading, requiring much reflection and non literal thinking. That’s long dead. Not just swarmed with distractions, we’re blind and deaf to anything beyond the most literal. Bouncing nonstop between bullshit, pornography and infantile jokes, we can only response to “triggers,” that is, single words or phrases without contexts. In such a climate, thinking is not possible, much less poetry.

Wallace Stevens, “Well, the gods grow out of the weather.” But everything grows out of the weather, including idiocy. Again, Stevens, “In the land of turkeys in turkey weather / At the base of the statue, we go round and round.” In the land of the masked and castrated, they endlessly circle their barely hidden masters.

With no role in society, poets have retreated into brainwashing centers known as “universities.” There, they must conform to the dominant ideology, as it evolves. Ever more divorced from mechanics, waitresses, garbagemen, policemen and bus drivers, they can barely beg their academic colleagues to read their trite, self-pitying or incomprehensible poems.

When man feared the weather, gods, beasts, hunger and whatever he couldn’t explain, which was pretty much everything, he wrote or recite poetry, but as he became, in his mind, at least, more of a master of his universe, he turned to prose. The more prosaic a life, the more it balks at poetry. This process has evolved over centuries until, finally, he has no literature left, just online bullshit. That said, smart prose still has a tiny, cult like audience, scattered across this devastated landscape, with no true adherent ever having met another.

My switch from poetry to nonfictional prose, though, occurred because I had no more poems in me. I was so innocent a poet, it’s embarrassing. Six years ago in Toluca, Mexico, I met a smooth faced young man who said he could die for poetry. Oscar Cortes wasn’t quite my youthful self, though. Doing him one better, I thought I could kill people with my poetry. I did my best.

[Bangkok on 10/13/22]

[Vientiane on 1//11/20]

[Washington DC on 9/8/10]