Words | Eloise Stark
The line on the map feels like common sense. But common sense that requires walls, databases, and drowned bodies to maintain itself deserves a harder look.
Here is a small test for any belief that presents itself as common sense: ask how much machinery it takes to keep it standing.
Truly self-evident things need no enforcement. Nobody patrols the belief that water is wet. But consider the ideas we call natural that are, on inspection, held upright by scaffolding so vast we’ve stopped seeing it. The gender binary is supposed to be the most obvious fact in the world—yet it apparently requires billion-dollar industries devoted to making women feel insufficient, hormone testing and separate categories in sport, surgeries assigning a sex to infants whose bodies decline to choose one, segregated spaces, and an undertow of violence policing anyone who strays. Capitalism is supposed to be simply how humans are—yet it needs prisons, debt, and the standing threat of destitution to keep everyone showing up. The rule is worth stating plainly: the more elaborate the apparatus required to make something look…
