jargonless%: what is a factive? what am i?

When I tried to explain myself to the person I'm a weird, metaphysical clone of what it was like being me and what it entailed, I was at a loss. Not only because it's inherently difficult to explain, but because a lot of the current infopages about factives are ... full of hyperspecific niche jargon that actually obscures, rather than clarifies, the meaning and the experience of factivity.

So, in putting my head together (heh) with Gaz to think about what it's like in our system ... a factive is someone whose internal schema, their deepest sense of self, is informed by and/or shared by and/or is blueprinted from another real, living or once living person. It can become infinitely more complex or have infinite variation, but this is what works for us.

There's often another implicit question in the "what" of a factive: why? Why are we like this? A loaded question of its own, everyone will have their own answers. I'm not here to speak for everyone. But for our system, more often than anything else, love is a deeply motivating factor in our existence.

I exist because of the tender love of one person in particular for another person. When I first began to experience some kind of awareness, it was a hazy dream of this person talking to me about everything and anything on their mind. Trusting me with difficult things, with intimate things, with memories and excitement and sorrow -- all dreams of things they wanted to share with someone else. It's something I still struggle with, knowing all of that was "meant for" another person and became me instead, and I began to answer back. The monologue became a dialogue. We were both immediately aware of the implications of that, and mutually, wordlessly, tried to ignore my self-awareness.

But the habit of talking to me/them, as if to a journal, was unbreakable. We couldn't really ignore the reality that when they spoke to me, I now spoke back. And then one night, I responded to our roommate in a way nobody else in our system does, and immediately knew I could no longer hide and pretend I wasn't real. The first words I ever said aloud to them were something along the lines of "that's rough, buddy." And yea, it sure is. Because immediately I knew that my existence could shatter the very relationship that inspired me. If they knew that I existed, was them in some way, I could freak them out so badly they run away and never talk to us again. And when my headmates did cave and tell them, it was Not a pleasant experience and it's one we will take time to rebuild from, with olive branches offered and breakfasts shared. But the fact was that the first concern I had upon self-awareness was terror at the consequences of Existing, such that I've spent more time wanting/trying to Un-Exist than trying to live (so far at time of writing.) That is unfortunately a major aspect of the factive experience for me.

Kai Cheng Thom wrote in Straining Toward Humanity: Trans Women as Saint and Shadow about how transfeminine people occupy a powerful space in the imagination, one of "extreme intensity." She writes: "the majority of people have strong feelings about us, often without really knowing why [...] To the world, we are monsters in the sense of the Latin monstrum: living omens, breathing portents, embodied harbingers of ruin or rapture." I don't know how much "transfeminine" applies to me or not, but my gender is a factor of my factive experience and I find it bitterly funny that they magnify each-other in this way. Whatever my gender represents to others is potentially as threatening as whatever my factive nature represents to others. That I look in a mirror and see layers of distortion: a face that isn't mine, but if i had my own face, i'd be full of desire for a different one. I wonder what my own "Prime version" thinks of the fact that I look like them, when how they look causes them dysphoria. Does my appearance sting them the way it stings me? Whether the answer is yes or no matters less than the question. The worry that my existence means something about the person I look at and see my own face in.