Each year, approximately twenty new state-shaped plaques are erected as part of the Ohio Historical Markers program. Adorned with gold buckeyes, they celebrate nationalist narratives of settler colonialism. The first one I encountered was on a visit to a small liberal arts school. That plaque commemorates the first Episcopal bishop of Ohio, “Pioneer in Higher Education.” My girlfriend at the time peed at its base and told me not to move to Ohio.
Fall crisps in the Buckeye State when my only trans colleague (in slacks and southern scorn) shares that grassroots organizations are considering blimps. Hovering at just under $100K, a blimp costs less than most houses. More pressingly, as a possible site of gender affirming care, the airborne dirigible would rise above state regulation. Engines whir, rudders spin, hormones hop, puberty blocked. On the ground, the gravity of state-sanctioned denial. But blimps fly by being lighter than air. Picture the airship: cribbed in its gondola, your body becomes a rising sign.
Of course, an Ohio Historical Marker also occupies Goodyear’s Wingfoot Lake Airship Hangar, saluting the test site for lighter-than-air crafts. Indeed, the iconic rise of the commercial Goodyear blimp in 1925 belies an interwar emphasis on military blimps fashioned for surveillance, intelligence-gathering, and anti-submarine warfare.
Taking a page out of Florida’s book, Senate Bill 83, aka the Ohio Higher Education Enhancement Act, would ban gender, race, and ethnic studies curricula under the auspices of “bias,” while instating surveillance over syllabi and instruction. Warfare still underway. One day, I may look like I’m teaching, but actually I’ll be aboard the blimp.
The Badyear blimp becomes my latest dissociation destination. Dissociation, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR) reminds, shares symptoms (plus a dash of assonance) with gender dysphoria. Diagnostically speaking, both dissociation and dysphoria arise from states of severe distress, marked by an “incongruence” between felt sense and material meaning. What you perceive and what I experience are two incongruent things.
When the National Rifle Association pulls up beside my Subaru, I’m using a voided California driver’s license to scrape ice out of the circular crevice that’s locked my fuel door shut. A rifle ripples across a shoulder, out-of-body beckons, and I board the blimp. When a student calls my class an insult to the $70K he pays in tuition because I’m teaching a Black feminist reception history of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I take the books and I board the blimp. And when drag queen story hour is stormed by swastikas en route to my workplace and when I drive past the confederate flags and the Trump Won signs and the clouds of deadnames and hail of misgenderings and when I park at blimp boarding, I don’t have to go through security twice because gender. Because gender, I board the blimp.
Picture the blimp. Actually, picture a fleet. A fleet of blimps. A school of blimps. A trans of blimps. Buoyant above the Ohio skyline, which is, in fact, farmland. Flat. Punctuated by mounds. Speckled in confederacy. Streaked with underground railroad. Flooded with chemical cargo. Barbed by what counts as a body.
But no matter. Up in the air, what we mark is a fugitive state of flight. Our bodies in balloons, ballasted by steering clear of state jurisdiction. No man’s land; all gender air. The most historic state is falling up. The sky doesn’t have to be the limit. That’s right, your bottom surgery is now cruising at 7,000 feet, and we are on top of the world.
