“The map is not the territory” is a valuable concept in engineering and something which trans people know from the core of our being.

Borges wrote the standard treatment of the concept, “On Exactitude in Science”

But some of us live this as our everyday reality.

The map is never the territory.

The map can tell you how to find it, describe the shape of it, and even help you understand a lot about it,

but the only way to truly know is to go explore the territory yourself and find out all the marvelous, horrifying ways in which reality asserts supremacy over any kind of mapping.

Trans Day of Remembrance is a map.

It tells us what-was, what has-been; it’s the campaign record of a years-long war perpetrated one-sided against a people who have always existed within humanity as a whole.

Because we’ve always been here, across all of human history and all human peoples - the liminal ones, the ones who don’t fit the easy stories that parents tell their children, unknowing that the children themselves don’t understand.

We’re the territory that the map doesn’t match.

Cartographers are so limited in limning borders; surveyors are chained by their own tools to measure only what those tools survey.

Our territory is yours, because we are you - we are of you, and in you, and around you, and we always have been, and always will be; you cannot see the air you breathe but it fills your lungs all the same.

The map is not the territory.

The battle-lines, the territories claimed by those who say, “we assert our dominance over this land” - they’re irrelevant to our nature.

Maps are frequently wrong. Ask anyone affected by post-colonial cartography, where those who speak Authority lay down a line and proclaim that this side is this side and that side is that; who then sit back and accolade themselves on jobs well-done and finished.

Borders aren’t real. The pen on the map does not draw a line on the land.

You cannot define us away; you cannot prevent us from screwing up your categories.

Categories are a map, and it’s a poor map indeed that contains only one road with two sides.

The map is not the territory. The territory isn’t even the territory; your experience of it as you exist within it and travel across it, as you transit beyond where you’ve travelled into new lands, or as you insist on sitting in a static seat - that’s not something that a map can map.

Why insist?

A map is a tool.

And like all tools, it has a use that was intended, a use it was made for, a use you put it to, and a use that it was actually fit to pursue.

And all of those may coincide, or may differ, or may be changed or left aside, as your skill insists.

A tool is discarded if it does not fit the hand - or smithed until it does.

The map is not the territory. And if it does not lead you safely home - and lead all those with you, for we are all of a party with all humanity - then it’s not a tool to help you.

Why hold to a map you did not chart, that does not show you safety?

The map is not the territory.

We who have stumbled into territory uncharted or forgotten or obscured know this from the core of our being.

We remember those others who found this, and carry forward with our steps forwards, towards -

Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?

Together.